Starry Skies Network

A team of scientists who last year suggested neutrinos could travel faster than light have conceded that Einstein was right and the sub-atomic particles are – like everything else – bound by the universe’s speed limit.

Astronomers have long known that the Andromeda Galaxy is headed our way. Now they’ve concluded that it most likely will collide with the Milky Way head-on — with dramatic consequences.

A surplus of radioactive atoms in Japanese trees may point to an unrecorded astronomical event that showered Earth with cosmic rays about 1,200 years ago.

Invisible dark matter particles may regularly pass through our bodies, and dozens to thousands of these particles may be colliding with atoms inside us every year, according to a new calculation.

A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory*1 in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction.
This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer.

LIGO is essentially a giant interferometer. There is a very large mirror hung in such a way as to form an arm, with two more mirrors hung perpendicular to it to form an L-shape when viewed from above. Scientists then pass laser light through a beam splitter, thereby dividing the beam between those two arms, and let the light bounce back and forth a few times before returning to the beam splitter.

New measurements of tiny galaxies contradict scientists’ best model of dark matter, further complicating the already mysterious picture of the stuff that is thought to make up 98 percent of all matter in the universe.

The dark ages of the universe — an era of darkness that existed before the first stars and galaxies — mostly remain a mystery because there is so little of it to see, but scientists intensely desire to shed light on them in order to learn secrets about how the universe came into being.

Dark energy is the basic constituent of the Universe today, one that is responsible for its accelerated expansion. Although astronomers observe the cosmological effects of the impact of dark energy, they still do not know exactly what it is.

Where did all the gold come from? Violent collisions between dense former stars may be why gold, lead, thorium and other heavy elements exist in such abundance.
Only hydrogen, helium and lithium were present after the big bang. Ordinary stars then fused elements up to the mass of iron. Anything heavier was created when smaller atoms captured neutrons, some of which then decayed into protons.

The reasoning behind why different amounts of matter, and associate antimatter, has survived the birth of our Universe may just have been solved by a physicist of the University of Warwick.

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a new study of the orbital evolution of minor planets Ceres and Vesta, a few days before the flyby of Vesta by the Dawn spacecraft. A team of astronomers found that close encounters among these bodies lead to strong chaotic behavior of their orbits, as well as of the Earth’s eccentricity.

The puzzling prevalence of matter over antimatter in the universe might be related to the bizarre space-time stretching caused by our galaxy’s spin, a new study suggests.