Cosmic rays are incredibly powerful invisible particles, and we can’t be sure where they come from. Not much in the way of a comforting thought, but it makes for a cosmic mystery that astronomers have been trying to solve for decades. And now they have come one step closer. Here’s what we do know. Cosmic rays are energetic atomic nuclei travelling at near the speed of light. They hit our atmosphere and rapidly interact with the molecules there to break into billions of smaller, less energetic particles that shower down on the life on Earth, without giving us much notice...
Remember that amazing high-def photo of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, from Hubble a few months back? It was able to separate the light from the galaxy into the millions of visible stars that populate its spiral arms. This image is used for far more than the wow factor of seeing another galaxy up close. It allows us to study the entire galaxy and gain insights into the lives of spiral galaxies beyond our own, how they formed, how they evolve, and maybe even how they will eventually die. By looking at the spiral arms of M31, where the youngest and...
NASA had announced a press conference for yesterday afternoon to reveal amazing findings that would ‘change how we look at galaxies.’ And they did just that, sort of. Findings from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) reveal that there is a huge surplus of Infrared light present in the vast darkness that exists between Galaxies. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but is emitted by most room temperature objects. It fills the EM spectrum at wavelengths longer than visible light (See yesterday’s post for the EM spectrum). This surplus of light is greater than what we would expect from galaxies...
