The forthcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope offers unprecedented new opportunities for astronomers. It's also a timely opportunity to reflect on what previous generations of telescopes have shown us.
Astronomy
Dec 23, 2021
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519
Meet R136a1, the most massive star known. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, it's a hulking behemoth weighing somewhere between 150 and 200 times the mass of the sun. Understanding the upper limit of stars helps astronomers ...
Astronomy
Aug 18, 2022
0
262
Scientists have known for some time that galaxies can grow by the merging of smaller galaxies, but the ancestry of our own Milky Way galaxy has been a long-standing mystery. Now, an international team of astrophysicists has ...
Astronomy
Nov 13, 2020
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2552
(Phys.org) —Move over, Matrix - astronomers have done you one better. They have created the first realistic virtual universe using a computer simulation called "Illustris." Illustris can recreate 13 billion years of cosmic ...
Astronomy
May 7, 2014
14
0
(Phys.org)—One of the first observations suggesting the existence of an invisible dark matter came in 1933 when astronomer Fritz Zwicky noticed that galaxy clusters were more energetic than they should be, according to ...
It is a galactic challenge, to be sure, but Gwendolyn Eadie is getting closer to an accurate answer to a question that has defined her early career in astrophysics: what is the mass of the Milky Way?
Astronomy
May 31, 2016
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1312
A fossilised remnant of the early Milky Way harbouring stars of hugely different ages has been revealed by an international team of astronomers. This stellar system resembles a globular cluster, but is like no other cluster ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2016
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2237
This Hubble image stars Messier 90, a beautiful spiral galaxy located roughly 60 million light-years from the Milky Way in the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin). The galaxy is part of the Virgo Cluster, a gathering of galaxies ...
Astronomy
May 24, 2019
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714
Extremely distant galaxies are usually too faint to be seen, even by the largest telescopes. But nature has a solution—gravitational lensing, predicted by Albert Einstein and observed many times by astronomers. Now, an ...
Astronomy
Feb 2, 2018
8
428
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has lost contact with its X-ray Astronomy Satellite Hitomi (ASTRO-H.) Hitomi was launched on February 17th, for a 3-year mission to study black holes. But now that mission ...
Space Exploration
Mar 30, 2016
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56
