Space seems dark to our weak human eyes. Most of the night sky is the blackness between stars. But in this darkness lies an endless number of photons, travelling in all different directions. These photos form background radiation, in three wavelengths in particular. You’ve likely heard of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), it there is also a Cosmic Optical Background (COB) and a Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB). The COB is explained by the immense number of stars in the Universe. It’s a diffuse glow across the entire sky. The CMB is the leftover radiation from hot plasma that existed when the Universe...
Massive star clusters can pop into existence in a matter of a few million years, a very short period of time on astronomical time scales. They consist of hundreds or thousands of massive, bright, hot stars that will live relatively short lives of a few hundred millions of years. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have discovered a vanishingly rare molecular cloud of highly dense gas, containing no stars. It is poised to become a massive star cluster, and we found it in its infancy. “We may be witnessing one of the most ancient and extreme modes of...
You may know that the Universe is much more complex than we know. If you look at nearly anything in a different wavelength of light, new details can pop up that you’d never expect. Astronomers today use all the wavelengths of light to study the Universe. Even the most seemingly boring objects can come to life in different wavelengths. As a prime example, take the Moon. Now I don’t find the Moon boring at all, in fact it’s quite interesting and has a lot of influence on the Earth, so its fun to talk about. But when we look at...
The Hubble Space telescope produced the finest Astronomical images in a generation, but Hubble’s time in the limelight has ended, and now it’s time for a new generation of both space- and ground-based telescopes to take over with their own jaw-dropping images and revolutionary science. Recently the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) has taken the leap and used its full power to take an astonishing image of the protoplanetary disk of the young star HL Tau. This image is of a very young star, only about a million years old (Which is really young compared to the 4.5 billions year old...
