An international team of astronomers has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to discover gravitationally bound star clusters when the universe was 460 million years old. This is the first discovery of star clusters ...
Astronomy
Jun 24, 2024
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28
The gravitational wave detectors LIGO and Virgo have detected a population of massive black holes whose origin is one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy. According to one hypothesis, these objects may have formed ...
Astronomy
Jun 24, 2024
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518
Studying the history of science shows how often serendipity plays a role in some of the most important discoveries. Sometimes, the stories are apocryphal, like Newton getting hit on the head with an apple. But sometimes, ...
Astronomy
Jun 20, 2024
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18
A new study published in Physical Review Letters explores the possibility that a strongly supercooled, first-order phase transition in the early universe could explain gravitational wave signals observed by pulsar timing ...
When stars collapse, they can leave behind incredibly dense but relatively small and cold remnants called neutron stars. If two stars collapse in close proximity, the leftover binary neutron stars spiral in and eventually ...
Astronomy
Jun 18, 2024
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839
Will future humans use warp drives to explore the cosmos? We're in no position to eliminate the possibility. But if our distant descendants ever do, it won't involve dilithium crystals, and Scottish accents will have evaporated ...
Space Exploration
Jun 17, 2024
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106
Astronomers believe that at the heart of most, if not all, galaxies sits a titanic black hole with a mass that is millions or even billions of times that of our sun. These supermassive black holes cannot be directly created ...
Astronomy
Jun 17, 2024
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1332
Observing gravitational waves from neutron stars as they glitch could help us understand these exotic stellar remnants.
Astronomy
Jun 17, 2024
0
28
In a discovery that challenges the conventional understanding of cosmology, scientists at Case Western Reserve University have unearthed new evidence that could reshape our perception of the cosmos.
Astronomy
Jun 17, 2024
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168
It's still just a plan, but a new telescope could soon be measuring gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are something like the sound waves of the universe. They are created, for example, when black holes or neutron stars ...
Astronomy
Jun 12, 2024
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331
Gravitation, or gravity, is a natural phenomenon by which physical bodies attract with a force proportional to their mass. Gravitation is most familiar as the agent that gives weight to objects with mass and causes them to fall to the ground when dropped. Gravitation causes dispersed matter to coalesce, and coalesced matter to remain intact, thus accounting for the existence of the Earth, the Sun, and most of the macroscopic objects in the universe.
Gravitation is responsible for keeping the Earth and the other planets in their orbits around the Sun; for keeping the Moon in its orbit around the Earth; for the formation of tides; for natural convection, by which fluid flow occurs under the influence of a density gradient and gravity; for heating the interiors of forming stars and planets to very high temperatures; and for various other phenomena observed on Earth.
Gravitation is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, along with electromagnetism, and the nuclear strong force and weak force. Modern physics describes gravitation using the general theory of relativity by Einstein, in which it is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime governing the motion of inertial objects. The simpler Newton's law of universal gravitation provides an accurate approximation for most physical situations.
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