How a speck of light becomes an asteroid

On the first day of the year 1801, Italian astronomer Gioacchino Giuseppe Maria Ubaldo Nicolò Piazzi found a previously uncharted "tiny star" near the constellation of Taurus. The following night Piazzi again observed this ...

Experimental mathematics: Computing power leads to insights

In his 1989 book "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose commented on the limitations on human knowledge with a striking example: He conjectured that we would most likely never know whether a string of 10 consecutive 7s appears ...

Astronomers explore 'last blank space' on map of the Universe

(PhysOrg.com) -- The most distant object ever discovered is described in this week's edition of the science journal Nature. Two international teams of astronomers report their observations of a gamma-ray burst from a star ...

Possibly the most distant object known

The most distant objects in the universe are also the oldest -- or at least that is how they appear to us, because their light has had to travel for billions of years to get here. They are also extraordinarily faint since ...

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