Category Astronomy/Space

An international team of researchers has put a theory speculated by the late Stephen Hawking to its most rigorous test to date, and their results have ruled out the possibility that primordial black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimeter make up most of dark matter. Details of their study have been published in this week’s Nature Astronomy.

Scientists know that 85% of the matter in the Universe is made up of dark matter. Its gravitational force prevents stars in our Milky Way from flying apart...

Structure suggested by theorists decades ago. Astronomers used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to make the first direct image of a dusty, doughnut-shaped feature surrounding the supermassive black hole at the core of one of the most powerful radio galaxies in the Universe – a feature first postulated by theorists nearly four decades ago as an essential part of such objects.

The scientists studied Cygnus A, a galaxy some 760 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy harbors a black hole 2...

Little is known about the inner structure of the Moon, but a major step forward was made by a University of Rhode Island scientist who conducted experiments that enabled her to determine the temperature at the boundary of the Moon’s core and mantle. She found the temperature to be between 1,300 and 1,470 degrees Celsius, which is at the high end of an 800 degree range that previous scientists had determined.

“In order to understand the interior structure of the Moon today, we needed to nail down the thermal state better,” said Ananya Mallik, a URI assistant professor of geosciences who joined the University faculty in December 2018...

This star-studded image shows us a portion of Messier 11, an open star cluster in the southern constellation of Scutum (the Shield). Messier 11 is also known as the Wild Duck Cluster, as its brightest stars form a “V” shape that somewhat resembles a flock of ducks in flight.

Messier 11 is one of the richest and most compact open clusters currently known. By investigating the brightest, hottest main sequence stars in the cluster, astronomers estimate that it formed roughly 220 million years ago...