Astronomy
An incredibly object was discovered 1.4 billion years after the BB
A ‘shadow’ cast on the faint, leftover glow of the Big Bang has revealed a giant object in the early Universe that defies our predictions of how the Universe should evolve. It’s a galaxy cluster named SPT2349-56. Spotted a mere 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, the gas within it is far, far hotter than it should be. The gravitational heating of a galaxy cluster ought to be a slow process that takes billions of years to reach the temperature regime of SPT2349-56. “We didn’t expect to see such a hot object atmosphere so early in cosmic history,” says astrophysics doctoral student Dazhi Zhou of the University of British…
Mars Was Habitable Longer Than We Thought
It is a scientific consensus that water once flowed on Mars, and that it had a denser atmosphere, meaning that it was once habitable. Unfortunately, roughly 4.2 to 3.7 billion years ago, Mars’ rivers, lakes, and global ocean began to disappear as solar wind slowly stripped its atmosphere away. For scientists, the question of how long it remained habitable has been the subject of ongoing inquiry. Where some scientists maintain that Mars ceased being habitable billions of years ago, recent research suggests that it experienced periods of habitability that lasted for eons. This includes recent findings by NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the Gale Crater on Mars to…
Is there a Black Hole inside our Sun?
There’s a hole inside our Sun. A mass equivalent to 1,500 Earths has disappeared. Tracking this over time could change the way we see stars. There’s a hole inside our Sun. Right in the middle. A mass the size of 1,500 Earths has simply disappeared. Much of what we know about the Sun’s behavior says it should be there – but when we interpret the data encoded in the Sun’s light, that mass is nowhere to be seen. Analysis of the transmission of sound and light from the Sun’s surface using a new three-dimensional model, as opposed to the usual 2D models, suggests that the Sun has a much different…
Is interstellar travel possible? Some arguments and questions
Interstellar travel is possible, says a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College. Through numerical simulations and computer calculations, they have observed that rotating black holes can be traversed. Scientists wanted to test whether Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) in Christopher Nolan’s film “Interstellar” could survive crashing into Gargantua – a fictional, rotating, supermassive black hole about 100 million times the mass of our sun. The physical properties of this black hole were taken from the book written by Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, on which the film was based. Do rotating black holes make interstellar travel possible? These mysterious creatures called black holes are…
Historic astronomical discovery 1300 light-years away
In a remarkable discovery in modern astronomy, an international group of scientists has observed for the first time the early stages of planet formation around a young star, called HOPS-315. The star is located in the Orion Nebula, about 1,300 light-years from the Sun. The new discovery, published in the prestigious journal Nature on July 16, 2025, marks a crucial moment in understanding the processes that led to the formation of our own Solar System and offers a unique window into the cosmic past of the universe. In this article, we will explore the details of this epochal observation, the technologies used, the scientific implications, and what this discovery means…
