This 1.5 Billion pixel image is the largest and sharpest photograph ever taken of the Andromeda Galaxy. In order to observe all of the 1.5 billion pixels, you’d need 600 HD TV screens to observe the image in full. (Image Caption: Each dot is a star.)

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have taken what is considered one of the most fascinating images of our cosmic neighbor. The 1.5 BILLION pixel image of the Andromeda galaxy shows the beauty and mystery engulfing our cosmic neighbor. Oh and, each one of those little dots is a star, and most of them have at least one planet, and many of them have several alien worlds.

The Andromeda galaxy also referred to as Messier 31 or just M31 is the only member of the local group of galaxies that has more mass than our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It is located a staggering 2.5 million light years from Earth.

The galaxy is approaching our galaxy at about 300 kilometers per second. The first reference to the Andromeda galaxy dates back to 961, and was made by Persian astronomer Azophi, whom in his Book of Fixed Stars describes as a “small cloud in the constellation of Andromeda.” The first telescopic observation corresponds to Simon Marius in 1612.

This image is the largest and sharpest image of the Andromeda galaxy ever taken.

As noted by Cosmos, in order to observe all of the 1.5 billion pixels you’d need 600 HD TV screens to observe the image in full.

In this unprecedented, jaw-dropping image you can witness over 100 million—of its estimated TRILLION stars.

In what appears to be a revolutionary cosmic observation, astronomers have reportedly detected a signal from the first stars of the universe. According to reports, the discovery has given researchers an unparalleled glimpse into the events that occurred right after the Big Bang.

While our current night sky is teeming with bright, twinkling stars, scientists say that this has not always been the case.

Apparently, the ancient signal that they have detected suggests that it took nearly 200 million years after the Big Bang for the earliest stars to emerge from the darkness.

This detection was discovered in the form of a radio signal by researchers from the EDGES project. It was assumed to have been triggered when lights from the earliest stars began making interactions with hydrogen gas.

Studies suggest that this gas was one of the first elements to have filled the primordial empty space of the early universe.

The detection of this signal is likely to open up a new line of inquiries and issues to be tackled by the scientific community.

“The era of cosmic dawn has been entirely uncharted territory until now,” Cynthia Chiang, a physicist from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, was quoted as saying. “It’s extremely exciting to see a new glimpse of this slice of the universe’s history, and the EDGES detection is the initial step toward understanding the nature of the first stars in more detail.”

Timeline of how the Universe was created from the Big Bang showing when the first stars emerged | NASA

For hundreds of years, many myths and scientific theories have been formulated to explain the origins of the cosmos. Among these theories, the most popular and widely accepted is the Big Bang theory.

Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, was the first scientists to suggest that the universe is expanding.

In the late 1920s, he proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory based on his hypothesis of the primeval atom or the cosmic egg.

According to studies, the universe was conceived billions of years ago with a fixed amount of energy and matter. However, shortly after it was born, it was plunged into deep darkness. It was only until hot gases fused with masses of dark matter that the first stars were formed.

This phenomenon eventually ignited the nuclear hearts of young suns.

These early stars breathed ultraviolet light into the cosmos and their photons merged with primordial hydrogen gas. This led the photons to absorb background radiation and become translucent.

After this event, the hydrogen atoms started producing radio signals that traveled through space at a predictable frequency. This same signal was what astronomers detected through a radio antenna, the size of a tabletop, called EDGES.

“This is the first real signal that stars are starting to form, and starting to affect the medium around them,” Alan Rogers, a scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, said in a statement.

“What’s happening in this period is that some of the radiation from the very first stars is starting to allow hydrogen to be seen. It’s causing hydrogen to start absorbing the background radiation, so you start seeing it in silhouette, at particular radio frequencies.”

In a studypublished by the researchers in the journal Nature, they described the signal from the first stars as “stretched” or “redshifted”. These are terms used to identify fingerprints of the earliest stars in radio waves. This is because the signal has been traveling through space for a long time now.

“The first indication of the signal emerged within weeks of turning on the instrument in 2015,” Judd Bowman, a coauthor of the study from the Arizona State University, said. “At first we assumed it was a problem with the instrument, because it was larger than anything we expected.”

The astronomers admitted that detecting the signal has been a tremendous technical challenge. Peter Kurczynski of the National Science Foundation, said:

“There is a great technical challenge to making this detection. Sources of noise can be a thousand times brighter than the signal they are looking for. It is like being in the middle of a hurricane and trying to hear the flap of a hummingbird’s wing.”

The radio signal reportedly dates back to around 180 million years after the Big Bang that occurred over 13 billion years ago.

One substantial information that the researchers found from the distant signal was that the gas in the early universe was apparently much colder than what was expected.

One explanation that they offered is that baryons, or ordinary matter, may have lost their energy when they interacted with dark matter during those early times.

It is believed that dark matter makes up a vast portion of the matter in our universe. However, it has never been directly observed.

According to Bowman, if their theory is confirmed, it would be considered as another fundamental discovery about the mysterious dark matter.

Bowman said that they welcome other researchers to confirm their detection using different radio telescopes.

In the future, he hopes that they would have new resources dedicated to the study of the signal from the first stars to gain more information.

“Now that we know this signal exists, we need to rapidly bring online new radio telescopes that will be able to mine the signal much more deeply,” he went on to say.

Space weather emitted by Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our stars (Sun), may make that system rather inhospitable to life after all. Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of astronomers discovered that a powerful stellar flare erupted from Proxima Centauri last March. 

This finding, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, raises questions about the habitability of our solar system’s nearest exoplanetary neighbor, Proxima b, which orbits Proxima Centauri.

At its peak, the newly recognized flare was 10 times brighter than our sun’s largest flares, when observed at similar wavelengths. Stellar flares have not been well studied at the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths detected by ALMA, especially around stars of Proxima Centauri’s type, called M dwarfs, which are the most common in our galaxy.

“March 24, 2017, was no ordinary day for Proxima Cen,” said Meredith MacGregor, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C., who led the research with fellow Carnegie astronomer Alycia Weinberger. Along with colleagues from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, David Wilner and Adam Kowalski, and Steven Cranmer of the University of Colorado Boulder — they discovered the enormous flare when they reanalyzed ALMA observations taken last year.

The flare increased Proxima Centauri’s brightness by 1,000 times over 10 seconds. This was preceded by a smaller flare; taken together, the whole event lasted fewer than two minutes of the 10 hours that ALMA observed the star between January and March of last year.

ESO/NRAO/NAOJ ALMA Array in Chile in the Atacama at Chajnantor plateau, at 5,000 meters

Stellar flares happen when a shift in the star’s magnetic field accelerates electrons to speeds approaching that of light. The accelerated electrons interact with the highly charged plasma that makes up most of the star, causing an eruption that produces emission across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

“It’s likely that Proxima b was blasted by high energy radiation during this flare,” MacGregor explained, adding that it was already known that Proxima Centauri experienced regular, although smaller, X-ray flares. “Over the billions of years since Proxima b formed, flares like this one could have evaporated any atmosphere or ocean and sterilized the surface, suggesting that habitability may involve more than just being the right distance from the host star to have liquid water.”

An earlier paper that also used the same ALMA data interpreted its average brightness, which included the light output of both the star and the flare together, as being caused by multiple disks of dust encircling Proxima Centauri, not unlike our own solar system’s asteroid and Kuiper belts.

But when MacGregor, Weinberger, and their team looked at the ALMA data as a function of observing time, instead of averaging it all together, they were able to see the transient explosion of radiation emitted from Proxima Centauri for what it truly was.

“There is now no reason to think that there is a substantial amount of dust around Proxima Cen,” Weinberger said. “Nor is there any information yet that indicates the star has a rich planetary system like ours.”

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

Credit: nrao.edu

So, you think you know the Milky Way? Well you don't. This new Milky Way map from NASA displays the exo-planets we've discovered so far, counting the newly confirmed exoplanet 13,000 light years away from Earth, catchily-named OGLE-2014-BLG-0124L. It's about half as far away as the farthest exoplanet ever found, one of only a few handfuls to be discovered beyond Kepler's range.

The majority of exoplanets that have been discovered were the work of the Kepler, but the very furthest ones that have been found — like this recent one — owe their discovery to microlensing methods. Like gravitational lensing, where gravity bends space and light to generate a natural "zoom lens" that lets us see further afield, microlensing also makes use of certainly occurring bends in space. In microlensing, however, that enlargement procedure is triggered by a fainter star passing in front of a more distant star, making the space around the distant star more easily observable.

Scientists Discover “Earth 2.0″ Via Kepler Space Telescope. Since it’s launch on March 7, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been busy collecting data about our galaxy with an interest in finding habitable planets like ours. Today, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced the spacecraft has done precisely that.

Surveying the Milky Way, Kepler has located a planet much like our own, an “Earth 2.0,” which they’ve named Kepler-452b. BBC reports that scientists say it may be the first planet we’ve discovered that’s most similar to Earth in its distance from its sun, as well as its size.

Kepler has discovered no fewer than 500 possible planets on its mission, though only 12 of them are of interest to scientists for their orbit around parent stars which would allow water to exist on their surfaces. Scientists are unsure as to whether its surface is rocky like Earth’s, and further exploration is need. But the news is a fascinating nonetheless.

“The other Kepler habitable zone planets that have been discovered so far tend to be orbiting M-dwarfs — stars far cooler than our sun, and therefore the planets need to orbit much closer to receive the same levels of heating,” Queen’s University Belfast researcher Dr. Chris Watson told BBC. “So it may be a potentially rocky super-Earth in an Earth-like orbit (in terms of host star and orbital distance). It’s this combination of the host star and orbit that set it apart in my opinion.”

An extraordinarily powerful "hypernova" a whopping 10.5 billion light-years from Earth is the most distant star explosion ever observed, a new study reports.

The Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago, which means that light from the hypernova, or superluminous supernova (SLSN), has been streaking through space for about three-quarters of the universe's existence.

Astronomers first spotted hypernovas just a decade or so ago. As the name suggests, these objects are extreme versions of "normal" supernovas. Several different phenomena may trigger these hypernovas, including the infall of material onto neutron stars, the rapidly rotating corpses of once-massive stars, study team members said. [Supernova Photos: Great Images of Star Explosions]

The newfound hypernova is known as DES16C2nm, because it was first spotted by the Dark Energy Survey, an international research effort that aims to better understand the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion. The initial detection came in August 2016; DES16C2nm's brightness and distance were confirmed two months later by astronomers using the Very Large and Magellan telescopes in Chile and Hawaii's Keck Observatory.

"It's thrilling to be part of the survey that has discovered the oldest known supernova," study lead author Mathew Smith, of the University of Southampton in England, said in a statement. "DES16C2nm is extremely distant, extremely bright, and extremely rare—not the sort of thing you stumble across every day as an astronomer."

The discovery of DES16C2nm holds more than mere gee-whiz value, Smith added.

"The ultraviolet light from SLSN informs us of the amount of metal produced in the explosion and the temperature of the explosion itself, both of which are key to understanding what causes and drives these cosmic explosions," he said.

DES16C2nm may not keep its distance record for long.

"Finding more distant events, to determine the variety and sheer number of these events, is the next step," study co-author Mark Sullivan, also of the University of Southampton, said in the same statement. "Now [that] we know how to find these objects at even greater distances, we are actively looking for more of them as part of the Dark Energy Survey."

The Dark Energy Survey is a five-year project that kicked off in 2013. It uses a 570-megapixel camera, mounted on a telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes, to study 300 million distant galaxies throughout the cosmos.

The new study was published online this month in The Astrophysical Journal.

Via Scientific American.

If the sun suddenly blinked out of existence, you would have nothing to worry about — for the first eight minutes, anyway. After that, all hell would likely break loose. Still, it wouldn't be the instantaneous end to life on Earth that you might think.

Light takes roughly eight minutes to reach Earth from the sun. For that reason, if the sun disappeared, we'd still see it in the sky for another eight minutes. But what about gravity? The sun is the anchor point of the solar system — at 333,000 times the mass of Earth, it exerts a hefty pull that keeps the planets locked in their orbits. If all that gravitational force disappeared, it would still take us eight minutes to feel it. That's because, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, gravity travels at the same speed as light. So go ahead, watch the rest of that Netflix episode. You'll be golden for another eight minutes.

After that, though, Earth still wouldn't be snuffed out. Electricity would still work, and it would still take up to an hour for the light from our planets to be reflected back to Earth, so there would be a peaceful glow in the sky. With no sunlight, photosynthesis would stop, but that would only kill some of the plants—there are some larger trees that can survive for decades without it.

Within a few days, however, the temperatures would begin to drop, and any humans left on the planet's surface would die soon after. Within two months, the ocean's surface would freeze over, but it would take another thousand years for our seas to freeze solid. By then, however, the atmosphere would collapse, radiation would seep in, and Earth would be an inhospitable wasteland drifting aimlessly through space. Lucky for you, the sun is showing no signs of disappearing any time soon.

Via Curiosity.

Victor Buso is a locksmith. He spends his days fiddling with locks and keys, and in his spare time he stares into the heavens in the observatory he built on the top floor of his own home. He’s devoted an incredible amount of time and money to his personal passion of skywatching, and now he’s the first person on the planet to witness something that scientists have been hoping to see for decades: the birth of a supernova.

Using the high-powered telescope mounted above his home, Buso recorded the bizarre behavior of a distant star. The far-off star let out a massive purge of energy from its core just moments before it exploded, confirming long-held beliefs of the birth of supernovas and landing his Buso’s name in the history books.

Buso, who told The Washington Post that he inherited his love of astronomy from his parents, witnessed the incredible sight after aiming a newly-acquired telescope-mounted camera at the distant galaxy NGC-613. The galaxy sits some 65 million light-years from Earth, meaning that everything we can see from it is as it was 65 million years ago. It just so happened that Buso’s timing was perfect, because he was able to spot a tiny bright speck that wasn’t there previously, and it was getting brighter.

He recorded the event and, after seeing that the tiny blip had eventually resulted in a supernova, he knew it was an extremely important sighting. The odds of stumbling upon a pre-supernova event such at this is something like 1 in 10 million, according to astrophysicist Melina Bersten, and it’s never been recorded before in the history of astronomy.

Soon, other astronomers began to record their own observations and, with the help of Buso’s incredibly early sighting, were able to determine what kind of star had birthed the supernova. They believe it was a supergiant star roughly 20 times the mass of our own sun, and the researchers were able to create computer models to simulate how the entire thing unfolded. The research was published this week in Nature.

Image Source: M C Bersten et al., Nature

The surface of the red giant star Π¹ Gruis from PIONIER on the VLT. Credit: ESO

"This is the first time that we have such a giant star that is unambiguously imaged with that level of details," said Fabien Baron, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University. "The reason is there's a limit to the details we can see based on the size of the telescope used for the observations.

An international team of astronomers has produced the first detailed images of the surface of a giant star, named π1Gruis, outside our solar system, revealing a nearly circular, dust-free atmosphere with complex areas of moving material, known as convection cells or granules, according to a recent study.

The giant star, named π1Gruis, is one of the stars in the constellation Grus (Latin for the crane, a type of bird), which can be observed in the southern hemisphere. An evolved star in the last major phase of life, π1Gruis is 350 times larger than the Sun and resembles what our Sun will become at the end of its life in five billion years. Studying this star gives scientists insight about the future activity, characteristics and appearance of the Sun.

Convection, the transfer of heat due to the bulk movement of molecules within gases and liquids, plays a major role in astrophysical processes, such as energy transport, pulsation and winds. The Sun has about two million convective cells that are typically 2,000 kilometers across, but theorists believe giant and supergiant stars should only have a few large convective cells because of their low surface gravity. Determining the convection properties of most evolved and supergiant stars, such as the size of granules, has been challenging because their surfaces are frequently obscured by dust.

An illustration of the structure of the Sun and a red giant star, showing their convective zones. These are the granular zones in the outer layers of the stars. Credit: ESO

For this paper, the team used an interferometer. The light from several telescopes is combined to overcome the limit of each telescope, thus achieving a resolution equivalent to that of a much larger telescope.

The star π1Gruis was observed with the PIONIER instrument, which has four combined telescopes, in Chile in September 2014. Baron, who specializes in making images, used interferometric data, image reconstruction software and algorithms to compose images of the star's surface. Interferometry is relatively new to astronomy, and Georgia State's Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy array was the first facility to use interferometry to image a star similar to the Sun in 2007.

"These images are important because the size and number of granules on the surface actually fit very well with models that predict what we should be seeing," Baron said. "That tells us that our models of stars are not far from reality. We're probably on the right track to understand these kinds of stars."

The detailed images also showed different colors on the star's surface, which correspond to varying temperatures. A star doesn't have the same surface temperature throughout, and its surface provides our only clues to understand its internals. As temperatures rise and fall, the hotter, more fluid areas become brighter colors (such as white) and the cooler, more dense areas become darker colors (such as red).

In the future, the researchers would like to make even more detailed images of the surface of giant stars and follow the evolution of these granules continuously, instead of only getting snapshot images.

Further Reading: Georgia State University, ESO, Nature

A group of astronomers has just made an unexpected discovery within the constellation of Orion. “Checking out the data for the first time was one of those ‘Wow!’ moments that appear only once or twice in an astronomer’s lifetime.”

Experts have discovered, thanks to new observations from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) VLT scanning telescope, three different groups of young stars within the Orion nebula cluster. In fact, astronomers have discovered stars in three different ages.

The European Southern Observatory is considered the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe and the world’s most productive astronomical observatory.

The new images provided by the European Southern Observatory’s VLT Survey Telescopegave experts an opportunity to measure the brightness and different colors of stars located in the Orion Nebula Cluster, courtesy of the telescope’s OmergaCAM—a massive wide field optical camera.

Astronomers usually refer to it as M42, and it is exactly there, where stars are born. This makes the Orion constellation one of the most prominent star formations in the night sky.  The three main stars of Orion as viewed from Earth are Rigel, Alnitak, and Mintaka.

Rigel, Orion’s brightest star is located a staggering 773 light-years away. Alnitak is found around 800 light years away from us and is believed to be 100,000 times more luminous than our Sun. Mintaka is the one located 915 light years away from us. It is 90,000 times more luminous than the Sun and is in fact a double star formation: the two orbit each other every 5.73 days.

Monika Petr-Gotzens, the co-author and also based at ESO Garching, continues, “This is a very important result. What we are observing is that the stars of a cluster at the start of their lives didn’t form collectively together. This may mean that our knowledge of how stars form in clusters needs to be modified.”

Astronomers also call Orion the Stellar nursery as it has many star forming areas. In this research, astronomers looked at the stars’ masses and ages.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) writes: “It indicates that star formation might progress in bursts, where each burst happens on a much faster time-scale than we previously believed.”

Astronomers analyzed the possibility that instead of showing different ages, the different brightness and colors the spotted of the stars were due to hidden companion suns—which may be responsible for making stars appear brighter and redder than they actually are.

However, if this is proven to be accurate, it would dictate quite unusual properties of the stars, something that has never before been observed.

Experts indicate how they’ve found that based on rotation speeds and spectra, the stars must have different ages.

Beccari and her colleagues published a study on the findings in the August issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics, titled “A tale of three cities: OmegaCAM discovers multiple sequences in the color magnitude diagram of the Orion Nebula Cluster.”

(H/T ESO)

Image: Images are official NASA's APODs.

A team of astronomers is making a bold prediction: In 2022, give or take a year, a pair of stars will merge and explode, becoming one of the brightest objects in the sky for a short period.

It’s notoriously hard to predict when such stellar catastrophes will occur, but this binary pair is engaged in a well-documented dance of death that will inevitably come to a head in the next few years, they say. The researchers began studying the pair, known as KIC 9832227, in 2013 before they were certain whether it was actually a binary or a pulsating star.

They found that the speed of the orbit was gradually getting faster and faster, implying the stars are getting closer together. The pair is so close, in fact, they share an atmosphere (as in this artist’s conception of an unrelated stellar merger). KIC 9832227’s behavior reminded the researchers of another binary pair, V1309 Scorpii, which also had a merged atmosphere, was spinning up faster and faster, and exploded unexpectedly in 2008.

Now, after 2 years of careful study to confirm the accelerating spin and eliminate alternative explanations, the team reported here today at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting that the pair will explode as a “red nova”—an explosion caused by a binary merging—in about 5 years’ time.

The scientists will continue to monitor KIC 9832227 over the coming years to both firm up their prediction and learn more about how such a death spiral ends in a red nova. Amateur astronomers can study it, too, measuring how it fluctuates in brightness at an ever-increasing rate. And when it blows, we’ll all be able to enjoy the show.

A new model on how stars are formed has added weight to the hypothesis that most – if not all – stars are born in a litter with at least one sibling.

Our own star at the center of the Solar System is probably no exception, and some astronomers suspect that the Sun's estranged twin might be the evil one, blaming it for the death of the dinosaurs.

After analyzing data from a radio survey conducted on a dust cloud in the Perseus constellation, two researchers from UC Berkeley and the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory have concluded all Sun-like stars are probably born with a companion.

"We ran a series of statistical models to see if we could account for the relative populations of young single stars and binaries of all separations in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as wide binaries," said UC Berkeley astronomer Steven Stahler.

For years, astronomers have wondered if the large number of binary and triple systems of stars in our galaxy are created close to one another, or if they fall in together after they've formed.

The 'born together' hypothesis has been the favorite, and simulations developed in recent decades have shown almost all stars could be born as multiples that often spin away on their own.

Empirical evidence supporting these simulations has been limited, unfortunately, which makes this new work rather exciting.

"Our work is a step forward in understanding both how binaries form and also the role that binaries play in early stellar evolution," said Stahler.

As part of the VLA nascent disk and multiplicity survey (VANDAM for short), the researchers mapped the radio waves leaking out of a dense cocoon of dust about 600 light-years away that contained a whole nursery of young stars.

The VANDAM survey allowed for a census of stars younger than half a million years old called Class 0 stars – mere babies in star terms – and stars a little older between 500,000 years and 1 million years, called Class 1.

Combined with data on the shapes of the surrounding cloud of dust, the scientists found 45 lonely stars, 19 binary star systems, and a further five that contained more than two stars.

While their results predicted all stars were born as binaries, they amended their conclusion to take into account limitations in their model by saying most stars formed inside the dense cores of dust clouds are born with a partner.

"I think we have the strongest evidence to date for such an assertion," said Stahler.

Looking closely at the distances between the stars, the researchers found all binaries separated by a gap of 500 AU or more were Class 0 and lined up with the axis of the egg-shaped cloud surrounding them.

Class 1 stars, on the other hand, tended to be closer together at around 200 AU and weren't aligned with their 'egg's' axis.

"We don't yet know quite what it means, but it isn't random and must say something about the way wide binaries form," said Sarah Sadavoy from the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

If most stars are born with a partner, where's ours?

A distance of 500 AU is roughly 0.008 light-years, or a bit under 3 light-days. To put it into perspective, Neptune is about 30 AU away, the Voyager 1 probe is currently just under 140 AU away, and the nearest known star Proxima Centauri is 268,770AU away.

So if the Sun has a twin, it's almost certainly not easily visible in our neighborhood.

But there is an hypothesis that our Sun has a dark twin that likes to swing by every now and then, and stir things up.

Given the name Nemesis, this theoretical trouble maker has been proposed as a reason behind an apparent 27-million-year cycle of extinctions on Earth, including the one that saw off most of the dinosaurs.

An astronomer from the University of California Berkeley named Richard Muller proposed 23 years ago that a red dwarf star 1.5 light-years away could periodically travel through the icy outer limits of our Solar System, stirring up material with its gravity, knocking a few more space boulders our way.

A dim passing star such as a brown dwarf could also explain other anomalies at the fringes of our Solar System, such as the odd, wide orbit of the dwarf planet Sedna.

There's no sign of Nemesis, but a long lost binary partner for our Sun could fit the bill.

"We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago," said Stahler.

In which case, our Sun would have gathered the lion's share of dust and gas it seems, leaving its twin dark and stunted.

No wonder it's a little pissed off.

This research is currently on pre-print website, arXiv.org, and has been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Article was published originally on ScienceAlert.  

We know that our universe has already lived through great number of exciting phases. But new research released overnight shows the universe has long passed its peak and is slowly but surely dying.

The research was presented at the year’s largest gathering of astronomers at the International Astronomical Union‘s General Assembly in Hawaii. But before we start writing any obituaries, let’s have a quick recap of the good times.

When the universe was less than a second old and more than a billion degrees Celsius, it was hot enough for exotic particles to freely pop in and out of existence. As the universe expanded, it cooled and was no longer able to produce hugely energetic particles.

After a few seconds, the universe was a sea of protons and neutrons, and after a few minutes it was mostly a dense fog of hydrogen and helium. In terms of building more complex matter, that was pretty much the end of the action for 400,000 years.

Then, quite suddenly, matter and radiation were decoupled and photons of light were able to free-stream across the universe for the first time. This is all very exciting for cosmology, but something important had also happened to the hydrogen and helium: it could now hold onto electrons and create neutral atoms.

This is another step on the path to making you and me: we need neutral hydrogen in order to form molecular hydrogen, we need this to efficiently cool pockets of gas that collapse rapidly to form the first stars, and we need stars to form the heavy elements such as carbon and oxygen that are the building blocks of life.

By this stage the universe was a few hundred million years old, and it was now busy heating itself back up as these first stars irradiated the surrounding material.

These stars were blowing themselves apart and dumping large quantities of heavy atomic species into space, producing many of the heavier elements we see today. Some of them may also have collapsed into black holes, sowing the seeds of some of the most massive galaxies that exist in the present day universe.

After this early phase of forming the first stars, we began to see the first structures that resemble modern galaxies, but in a very messy and violent form. For the next few billion years galaxies smashed together to form more massive systems and star formation was rapidly turned on and off.

This activity continued until the universe was about 3 billion years old, a period we know as the peak of cosmic star formation. So the universe got most of the exciting stuff out of the way really early on.

What has it been doing since then? It is slowly but steadily dying. It is still producing new stars every now and again, but the rate at which old stars are fading outstrips these bright young things.

To exacerbate things even further, about 3 billion years ago a mysterious (and much studied) entity called dark energy began to dominate the energy contents of the universe and accelerate everything apart (measuring this acceleration won Australian researcher Brian Schmidt and others a Nobel prize).

The universe had already started cooling off by this stage, so dark energy arriving on the scene really twisted the knife.

How do we know all of this? Well, we have been building the evidence for a while and careful models of galaxy evolution have already suggested that the universe is fading, but we wanted to directly observe this effect over many billions of years.

In the past few years a large Australian led project called the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey invested huge effort into measuring most of the energy output from stars.

We had to observe nearby galaxies from the far-ultraviolet (where young stars produce much of their light) through the optical and the near-infrared (where most stars peak in energy output) all the way into the far-infrared (where star light absorbed by dust is re-emitted).

GAMA has been able to measure this huge span of radiation over the past 5 billion years for almost 200,000 galaxies, categorically establishing that the energy output of stars in the universe is winding down.

The good news is that the stars made to date will still last many billions of years yet (including our own sun). Some of the smaller stars should keep shining for longer than the current age of the universe.

There are questions over what exactly the dominance of dark energy will mean in the long term, with some of more exotic theories speculating that it could tear everything apart in a “Big Rip”.

Less dramatic, and more likely given our current knowledge, is the theory that the universe will continue to cool forever, and non gravitationally bound structures will steadily move apart from each other. After trillions of years we will only be able to see our own galaxy as the others will have raced too far away. After hundreds of trillions of years no new stars will be made anywhere at all.

Next our galaxy will eject most of its remaining stars into the cosmic void, and what is left will collapse into our central black hole. All matter as we know it will eventually decay, the black holes will evaporate and what is left will be a very lonely and empty place.

The universe will have ceased converting mass into light, and it will be left in almost total darkness. Every once in a while the remaining photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos will meet and dance, but they will soon continue their solitary journeys. The universe, in any sense that we know it today, will be over.

The phase we are in now could be considered to be the slow death throes of the universe. But on a more upbeat note, this is its Indian summer. After those hectic early days I think we can all agree that it deserves a good rest.

From galaxies that are 13 billion years old to changing colors of Jupiter’s great spot, we will take a look at seven objects in space that we just can’t explain. (Image: This enhanced image of SN1993J is truly an example of the beauty of the cosmos )

The Moon’s mysterious Magnetic Field: The moon has remained magnetically inert for eon but new research confirms that this was not always the case. Over 4 billion years ago an inner molten moon core whirled against lunar mantle. Pretty much like Earth’s own dynamo. Surprisingly our little moon was able to generate a mightier magnetic field than ours. No one know why sun a puny body displayed such a potent magnetic activity.

Asteroid With Rings: All the Gas Giants in our solar systems are encircled by rings. Though most of these are tenuous debris quite unlike Saturn’s massive sets of rings. Now for first time and quite unexpectedly astronomers have found rings around a much smaller body. Meet ‘Chariklo’. Chariklo is an asteroid measuring only 250 km across, yet has its own ring system. Chariklo, though the largest object in its cosmic vicinity, look like an unremarkable chunk of space rock. It turned out that this particular asteroid not only hosts one but two cosmetic necklaces.  Containing a good amount of water, the larger of the rings encircling the asteroid is 7 km wide and the other one is half that size. Its discovery stunned astronomers.

The Six Tailed Asteroid: Hubble space telescope has revealed yet another incredible curiosity. An asteroid that acts as a comet. Comets are easily recognizable by their bright tails but asteroid do not show anything like that since they contain very little ice. So spotting an asteroid with not just one but six tails is quite a big deal. This particular asteroid blasts material indiscriminately in to the space like a cosmic lawn sprinkler.

The Colors of Jupiter’s Red Storm: You have probably seen amazing pictures of Jupiter’s massive hurricane that’s bee hurling across its southern hemisphere for at least 400 years. We know that it’s a hurricane like phenomena that you could fit 3 earths inside it and that’s its cooler & higher than its nearby clouds. With the research spanning over centuries we also know that it changes color from light pink to pale red and it is also shrinking but unfortunately we simply don’t know the answers about what’s really causing it and why.

Hot Jupiter Messes: Hot Jupiter or massive Gas Giants are in a tight orbit around their stars and they usually exist in the outer realms of a star system like ours. But the recent discoveries of these massive gas giant has raised many question because these gas giants were discovered way close to their stars, which is highly unlikely and also unexplainable with the current cosmological models.

Galaxies 13 billion Years Old: According to our current theories, the early universe was an approximation of a hell, a boiling opaquely dense place with only electrons and protons. Almost half a billion years passed before the baby universe cooled down enough to allow the formation of neutrons. Shortly thereafter the universal landscape settled further so that the stars and galaxies could come into being. A recent ultra-deep survey by Subaru telescope located in Hawaii and run by the National Astronomical Observatory Japan, revealed seven of the earliest galaxies ever over 13 billion light years distant. They appeared as unimaginably faint pinpricks of light.

Iciness of Saturn’s Ring: The ultra-thin icy rings of Saturn are also as mysterious as the Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. We know what they are made of and we understand some of the tidal forces that caused them to change shape. We are also pretty sure that formed some 4.4 billion years ago but we still aren’t sure how they actually formed.

Why are they made up of almost entirely of ice? And why there are able to maintain such a perfectly flat shape as they whirl around the planet with its many moons. So the formation of Saturn rings still remains a mystery.

The new planet dubbed Proxima C orbits Proxima Centauri, a star system located some 4 light years from Earth. You may remember the Proxima Centauri system from 2016 when astronomers discovered a planet they nicknamed the SECOND Earth.

In August of 2016, astronomers announced the discovery of Proxima b, a potentially habitable orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Solar System—located a mere four light years from Earth.

Proxima Centauri is about one-seventh the actual diameter of the Sun. It has a mass about an eighth of the Sun’s mass (M☉), and its average density is about 40 times that of the Sun

The discovery of Proxima B got astronomers very excited, they believed they discovered an alien world extremely similar to Earth, capable of sustaining life as we know it. Some even called Proxima B the SECOND Earth or Earth’s twin.

Now, a new data analysis has shown the presence of another alien world orbiting Proxima Centauri: Proxima C.

Using the  High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a high-precision spectrograph installed on ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, astronomers involved in the Red Dots project have found what they believe could be the signature of another exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri.

The ongoing Red Dots campaign, is a search for planets around our nearest three red dwarf stars: Proxima Centauri, Barnard’s Star, and Ross 154.

Just as a star influences the planets by means of gravity, the planets also do the same with their star, causing the star to “totter” and change the wavelength of its brightness in a very small but measurable amount. By analyzing these repetitive and predictable changes, astronomers are able to infer the presence of a planet.

This is awesome, mostly because experts still believe Proxima B—the alien world discovered in 2016—could sustaining life as we know it.

The discovery of Proxima C raises hopes of finding another potentially habitable world outside our solar system.

The following chart shows the 2016 data that confirmed the existence of Proxima b (top left), where you can see the curve representing the star’s wobble, with a regular pattern of radial velocity change that repeats every 11, 2 days. In the new measurements of HARPS (top right), astronomers detected another, very similar signal that infers the existence of Proxima C, another alien world orbiting the Proxima Centauri system.

As noted by Astrobiology, the new data once again confirms Proxima B’s signal (in yellow), but also includes additional data patterns — visible here as a downward slope in both the 2016 and 2017 data points — hinting that there may be more to be discovered. To make a firmer statement on what is causing these patterns, astronomers need to use quantitative mathematical tools.

To ascertain whether it is a planet, astronomers made use of quantitative mathematical tools, such as a periodogram (shown at the bottom of the image above), which looks for repetitive signals in the data – graphed as prominent peaks – which indicate the presence of a planet.

The first signal (white) corresponds to Proxima b. The second set of possible periods (in red), of about 200 days, would be the hypothetical planet Proxima c.

The Red Dots exoplanetary search campaign will continue until the end of September, so the next few weeks will be critical to confirm or discard this data.

Sources and References: 

Space.com

National Geographic

Have you ever seen a 9-gigapixel map of the Milky Way Galaxy? The jaw-dropping image contains around 84 million stars and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The original image has 24.6 gigabytes. How would I define it? COSMIC LOVE.

With the naked eye, you’d probably see the center of the Milky Way—with countless stars and cosmic dust clouds—occupying a small patch of a few inches.

However, thanks to the VISTA telescope we got one of the most detail portraits of the Milky Way EVER produced which has allowed astronomers to catalog a staggering 84 million stars.

After seeing this image, ask yourself... Are we alone in the Milky Way?

The above image is just a small, reduced—thumbnail version of the original image which has a mind-boggling resolution of 108,500×81,500—or if you prefer 9 giga-pixels, occupying 24.6 gigabytes. If for some reason you want to download the 24.6-gigabyte image you can do so by clicking here.

Check out the ENTIRE 9-gigapixel image—and zoom in on those stars—by clicking here. This image is simply too big to be displayed at full resolution and is best appreciated using the zoom tool.

In order to obtain this image, ESO’s VISTA telescope—which stands for Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy—snapped thousands of images of the sky after which astronomers compiled them into one 9 giga-pixel mosaic. The Vista telescope is one of the LARGEST visible and near infrared telescopes on the planet, and it just showed us how cool it really is which this mind-bending image.

The image you are seeing is crystal clear because the VISTA telescope boasts a stunning infrared camera which enables it to peer through the dust clouds that obscure the view of other telescopes.

In order to understand how powerful the VISTA telescope really is, here below is a comparison between an image of the Milky Way—the same image—as seen from an infrared telescope and a visible telescope.

Pretty amazing right ? Just imagine what else is out there? The Milky Way galaxy is really unique, it’s beautiful and this image makes you love our cosmic home even more, right?

But this image wasn’t taken just for aesthetic purposes. In fact, this massive image has allowed scientists and astronomers to identify numerous cosmic objects in space that are worth researching further. This image allowed astronomers to identify 84 million stars in the Milky Way.

Our cosmic home—the Milky Way—is part of a supermassive structure interconnected by over 800 galaxies located at around 1000 million light years away. Our galaxy is part of an intergalactic highway that stretches some 500 million light years across and contains around 100,000,000,000,000,000 Suns, dubbed by scientists as Laniakea.

Oh and, just a fun fact here, did you know that astronomers maintain that there are around 500 billion galaxies in the known universe, which means there are around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. Astronomers argue that just inside our Milky Way Galaxy, there are some 400 BILLION STARS.

Image credit: ESO

A HUGE hole has been detected in the Earth’s magnetic shield, leaving millions of human beings vulnerable to deadly cosmic radiation, scientists have warned.

From analyzing data from the GRAPES-3 muon telescope in Ooty, India, experts have concluded that the magnetosphere has come under such heavy bombardment in recent years that it weakening.

On June 22, 2015, there was a massive burst of galactic cosmic rays which traumatized the Earth’s magnetic shield for two hours.

Roughly 40 hours before the Earth was bombarded by cosmic rays, the sun ejected a giant cloud of plasma which caused high energy radiation to strike the Earth’s magnetosphere at 2.5 million kilometers per hour.

The storm wreaked havoc on technology with radio signal blackouts reported in North and South America.

However, it is not until now that scientists have been able to understand the full extent of the damage caused by the storm.

Image Source: NASA

Experts from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India ran several simulations based on the data from the telescope and found that the magnetosphere had been cracked for a little while on the day.

Worryingly, the bombardment was so intense the magnetosphere was forced to shrink from 11 to four times the Earth’s radius.

While small amounts of radiation would have little effect on life on Earth, prolonged exposure to higher amounts of radiation can lead to cancer.

The team say in their research published in Physical Review Letters that the storm was so powerful that it managed to “reconfigure” the magnetic shield and opening small cracks in Earth’s first line of defense.

This has dangerous implications for the future, the team says.