Space and astrophysics research made simple
Astronomers have found that the core of a red giant, the type of star that our Sun will eventually become, spins ten times as fast as its surface. And it happens because of a phenomenon we can see here on Earth, too.You have probably seen a figure skater perform a so-called 'scratch spin', where she starts out with arms and free leg extended, before pulling them in – and spinning faster as a result...
They may come from completely different fields of study, but brain scans and supernovae have more in common than you would think. In a new TED talk, Michelle Borkin explains how software developed for use in a hospital was able to help astronomers study the structure of supernovae.An astronomer colleague of Borkin's at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had eight years worth of data from the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A...
2011 has been a busy year for particle physicists. They've found a new particle, closed in on the elusive Higgs boson, and witnessed some neutrinos acting pretty strangely, amongst other things...
When a star becomes a white dwarf — an old, extremely dense star that would have once been similar to our own Sun — the eventful part of its life is over.
How did the Christmas gamma-ray burst explode? No, it's not a geeky Christmas cracker joke, it's a real question scientists have been trying to answer since Christmas day last year, when a gamma-ray burst called GRB 101225A first lit up the sky...
Tomorrow afternoon, in "the most eagerly awaited scientific presentation of the century to date", particle physics laboratory Cern will update the world on its search for the Higgs boson, that elusive particle that is believed to give mass to fundamental particles.The Higgs is the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, currently the best theory we have to describe how particles interact, that we have not yet observed...
Cygnus X is a star forming region in the constellation Cygnus in the night sky. It looks rather pretty in visible light, as shown at the beginning of the video below.
Every year the Royal College of Science Union at Imperial College runs an essay competition called the Science Challenge. There are usually four questions to answer and a number of prizes for the essays that answer them best.I've been shortlisted before, but this year I finally won something — the Physics prize...
Hubble has uncovered a goldmine of young dwarf galaxies that are undergoing intense bursts of star formation. Dwarf galaxies are the most common in the universe but until now astronomers had seen few examples of distant dwarf galaxies because they are small and not very bright...
Galaxies do not usually exist alone. They tend to bunch together in small groups, like the Local Group of galaxies in which the Milky Way sits, or larger groups called clusters.
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