When you start to think about the most massive and extreme ‘stuff’ in the universe, you inevitably go to Dark Matter and Dark Energy. They exist as opposites, one with incredible gravity holding the universe together, and the other a mysterious vacuum energy tearing it apart. Studying this cosmic tug of war gives astronomers a chance to determine the past and future of the entire universe. To study the immense scale of these two quantities, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS) constructed a 3D map of the sky, amounting to a volume...
Ever heard the term ‘champagne flow?’ I’m not talking about a celebration, it’s actually a term in astronomy. When a cluster of massive stars form and ionize the surrounding hydrogen cloud, the hot gas propels itself through the layers of cooler gas at the cluster outskirts. When the hot gas finally bursts through to the vacuum of space, it flows rapidly like a newly opened bottle of champagne. This is exactly what’s happening in the cluster RCW 34, a young, gaseous cluster in the southern constellation Vela. The interesting thing about this cluster is that its nearly invisible in optical...
Have you ever heard of an object called ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp?’ It’s a thin wispy ghost-like blob at the edge of a Galaxy. It was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 as she was classifying galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. Since then, astronomers have been studying its origin, as it was the first of a brand new phenomenon in astronomy. This past week, a new data set of wispy trails at the edge of Galaxies have been released as part of a Hubble study by Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. The new Hubble...
New research using the ESA’s Planck telescope has revealed that the first stars to shine in the universe sprouted up 100 Million years later than originally thought. Studying the universe is like piecing together a 13.8 Billion year story, from the time of the Big Bang to the present. We study objects in the local Galaxy to piece together the present state, and we look further from Earth to see back in time and visit the earlier chapters to determine the long term evolution of the universe. When the universe was 380,000 years old, it was large enough for the...
