Category Astronomy/Space

Cygnus X-3 is an X-ray binary where a compact source is pulling material away from a massive companion star. Chandra’s high-resolution X-ray vision revealed a cloud of gas and dust that is a separated by a very small distance from Cygnus X-3. This gas cloud, dubbed the “Little Friend,” is a Bok globule, the first ever detected in X-rays and the most distant one ever discovered. Astronomers detected jets produced by the “Little Friend”, showing that a star is forming inside it. Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/M.McCollough et al, Radio: ASIAA/SAO/SMA

A snapshot of the stellar life cycle has been captured in a new portrait from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Smithsonian’s Submillimeter Array (SMA)...

An overview of the NA64 experimental set-up at CERN. NA64 hunts down dark photons, hypothetic dark matter particles. Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

One of the biggest puzzles in physics is that 85% of the matter in our universe is “dark”: it does not interact with the photons of the conventional electromagnetic force and is therefore invisible to our eyes and telescopes. Although the composition and origin of dark matter are a mystery, we know it exists because astronomers observe its gravitational pull on ordinary visible matter such as stars and galaxies.

Some theories suggest that, in addition to gravity, dark matter particles could interact with visible matter through a new force, which has so far escaped detection...

Scientists behind a theory that the speed of light is variable – and not constant as Einstein suggested – have made a prediction that could be tested.

Scientists behind a theory that the speed of light is variable – and not constant as Einstein suggested – have made a prediction that could be tested. Einstein observed that the speed of light remains the same in any situation, and this meant that space and time could be different in different situations.The assumption that the speed of light is constant, and always has been, underpins many theories in physics, such as Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In particular, it plays a role in models of what happened in the very early universe, seconds after the Big Bang.

But some researchers have suggested that the speed of light could have ...

Credit: University of Manchester

Scientists working on a revolutionary telescope project have harnessed the power of distributed computing from the UK’s GridPP collaboration to tackle one of the Universe’s biggest mysteries – the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Researchers at The University of Manchester have used resources provided by GridPP – who represent the UK’s contribution to the computing grid used to find the Higgs boson at CERN – to run image processing and machine learning algorithms on thousands of images of galaxies from the international Dark Energy Survey, DES.

The team is part of the collaborative project to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a new kind of telescope currently under construction in Chile and designed to conduct a 10-year survey of...