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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Hubble Breaks Cosmic Distance Record: Sees Universe soon after Big Bang

    March 4, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This image shows the position of the most distant galaxy discovered so far within a deep sky Hubble Space Telescope survey called GOODS North (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North). The survey field contains tens of thousands of galaxies stretching far back into time. The remote galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 3 percent of its current age. It belongs to the first generation of galaxies in the Universe and its discovery provides new insights into the very early Universe. This is the first time that the distance of an object so far away has been measured from its spectrum, which makes the measurement extremely reliable. GN-z11 is actually ablaze with bright, young, blue stars but these look red in this image because its light was stretched to longer, redder, wavelengths by the expansion of the Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University)

    This image shows the position of the most distant galaxy discovered so far within a deep sky Hubble Space Telescope survey called GOODS North (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North). The survey field contains tens of thousands of galaxies stretching far back into time. The remote galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 3 percent of its current age. It belongs to the first generation of galaxies in the Universe and its discovery provides new insights into the very early Universe. This is the first time that the distance of an object so far away has been measured from its spectrum, which makes the measurement extremely reliable...

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    Great Tilt gave Mars a new Face

    March 3, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Scenario for a TPW driven by a late growth of Tharsis contemporaneous with valley network incision.

    Scenario for a TPW driven by a late growth of Tharsis contemporaneous with valley network incision.

    The surface of the planet Mars tilted by 20 – 25 degrees 3 to 3.5 billion years ago. This was caused by a massive volcanic structure, the Tharsis volcanic dome, which is the largest in the Solar System. Because of its extraordinary mass, it caused the outer layers of Mars (its crust and mantle) to rotate around its core. The discovery of this huge shift changes our vision of Mars during the first billion years of its history, at a time when life may have emerged...

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    ALMA spots Baby Star’s growing blanket

    March 3, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist's impression of the baby star TMC-1A. The star is located in the center and surrounded by a rotating gas disk. Gas is infalling to the disk from the envelope further out. Credit: Image courtesy of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

    Artist’s impression of the baby star TMC-1A. The star is located in the center and surrounded by a rotating gas disk. Gas is infalling to the disk from the envelope further out. Credit: Image courtesy of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

    The first direct observations delineating the gas disk around a baby star from the infalling gas envelope has been made. This finding fills an important missing piece in our understanding of the early phases of stellar evolution. The baby star TMC-1A is 450 light years away in the constellation Taurus. TMC-1A is a protostar, a star still in the process of forming. Large amounts of gas still surround TMC-1A.

    Stars form in dense gas clouds. Baby stars grow by taking in the surrounding gas. In this process, gas cannot flow directly into the star...

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    The Origins of the Universe

    March 2, 2016, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    The nuclear phase diagram: RHIC sits in the energy "sweet spot" for exploring the transition between ordinary matter made of hadrons and the early universe matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

    The nuclear phase diagram: RHIC sits in the energy “sweet spot” for exploring the transition between ordinary matter made of hadrons and the early universe matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

    An in-depth look at the origins of matter and the environmental conditions that helped shape the universe today. Our understanding is shaped by re-creating events that constituted the Big Bang and by studying the primordial soup of fundamental particles of the very early universe. One of the best science tools for this is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

    RHIC, a particle collider, is the first machine capable of mashing together heavy ions, which are atoms that h...

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