Category Astronomy/Space

Artist impression of W2246-0526, the most luminous known galaxy, and three companion galaxies. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

ALMA data show the most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from at least three of its smaller neighbors. The light from this galaxy, known as W2246-0526, took 12.4 billion years to reach us, so we are seeing it as it was when our universe was only about a tenth of its present age.

New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal distinct streamers of material being pulled from three smaller galaxies and flowing into the more massive galaxy, which was discovered in 2015 by NASA’s space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)...

Artist depiction of the MMS spacecraft that provided the first view of magnetic reconnection.
Credit: NASA/GSFC

Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have captured a difficult-to-view singular event involving “magnetic reconnection” – the process by which sparse particles and energy around Earth collide producing a quick but mighty explosion – in the Earth’s magnetotail, the magnetic environment that trails behind the planet.

Magnetic reconnection has remained a bit of a mystery to scientists. They know it exists and have documented the effects that the energy explosions can have – sparking auroras and possibly wreaking havoc on power grids in the case of extremely large events – but they haven’t completely understood the details...

The nearest single star to the Sun hosts an exoplanet at least 3.2 times as massive as Earth — a so-called super-Earth. Data from a worldwide array of telescopes, including ESO’s planet-hunting HARPS instrument, have revealed this frozen, dimly lit world. The newly discovered planet is the second-closest known exoplanet to the Earth and orbits the fastest moving star in the night sky. This image shows an artist’s impression of the planet’s surface.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

A planet has been detected orbiting Barnard’s Star , a mere 6 light-years away. This breakthrough is a result of the Red Dots and CARMENES projects, whose search for local rocky planets has already uncovered a new world orbiting our nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri.

The planet, designated Barnard’s Star b, now steps i...

Sketch of dimensional reduction.
Credit: David Weir

With the help of computer simulations, particle physics researchers may be able to explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe. The simulations offer a new way of examining conditions after the Big Bang, and could provide answers to some fundamental questions in particle physics.

In the Standard Model of particle physics, there is almost no difference between matter and antimatter. But there is an abundance of evidence that our observable universe is made up only of matter – if there was any antimatter, it would annihilate with nearby matter to produce very high intensity gamma radiation, which has not been observed...