Category Astronomy/Space

Small telescopes in Chile are first on Earth to cut through the cosmic noise. For the first time, scientists have used Earth-based telescopes to look back over 13 billion years to see how the first stars in the universe affect light emitted from the Big Bang.

Using telescopes high in the Andes mountains of northern Chile, astrophysicists have measured this polarized microwave light to create a clearer picture of one of the least understood epochs in the history of the universe, the Cosmic Dawn.

“People thought this couldn’t be done from the ground. Astronomy is a technology-limited field, and microwave signals from the Cosmic Dawn are famously difficult to measure,” said Tobias Marriage, project leader and a Johns Hopkins professor of physics and astronomy...

A violent solar eruption on May 31 launched a coronal mass ejection (CME) hurtling toward Earth, triggering a rare G4-level geomagnetic storm alert. Captured in real-time by U.S. Naval Research Laboratory instruments, this cosmic blast has the potential to disrupt satellites, communications, and military systems.

Local weather alerts are familiar warnings for potentially dangerous conditions, but an alert that puts all of Earth on warning is rare.

On May 31, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) space-based instrumentation captured real-time observations of a powerful Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that erupted from the Sun initiating a “severe geomagnetic storm” alert for Earth.

“Our observations demonstrated that the eruption was a so-called ‘halo CME,’ meaning it was Earth-d...

New research published by Michigan State University astrophysicists could help scientists answer a century-old question: Where did galactic cosmic rays come from?

Cosmic rays—high-energy particles moving close to the speed of light—originated from somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy and beyond, but exactly where has been a mystery since they were discovered in 1912. Shuo Zhang, MSU assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and her group led two studies that shed new light on where cosmic rays might have come from...

For years, astronomers have predicted a dramatic fate for our galaxy: a head-on collision with Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor. This merger—expected in about 5 billion years—has become a staple of astronomy documentaries, textbooks and popular science writing.

But in our new study published in Nature Astronomy, led by Till Sawala from the University of Helsinki, we find the Milky Way’s future might not be as certain previously assumed.

By carefully accounting for uncertainties in existing measurements, and including the gravitational influence of other nearby galaxies, we found there is only about a 50% chance the Milky Way and Andromeda will ...