LIGO has spotted another gravitational wave just after turning back on
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Leah Crane
5y ago
One of LIGO’s gravitational wave detectors Christian Offenberg / Alamy Stock Photo By Leah CraneLIGO is back at it. Having just turned back on after months of upgrades on 1 April, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory has already spotted another pair of black holes colliding. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that occur whenever massive objects move, like the wake behind a boat travelling across a lake. LIGO announced the first-ever observations of gravitational waves in 2016 and has now spotted a total of 12 gravitational signatures of pairs of enormous objects s ..read more
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Antony Gormley’s virtual reality adventure lets you ski on the moon
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Legacy content author
5y ago
Amazing voyage: skate round lunar crater rims or crash into cratersAntony Gormley, stills from Lunatick, 2019, courtesy of Antony Gormley Studio and Acute Art By Simon IngsLunatick by Antony Gormley and Priyamvada Natarajan, from Acute Art, The Store X, London, 5 – 25 April VISIT The Store X, a venue for art and design in London’s West End, and you are in for quite a journey. Wearing an HTC Vive headset, you are given an island to explore in Lunatick, a glossy, game-like virtual-reality experience that starts at Kiribati in Micronesia. For a while, you have the run ..read more
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Weird star system has double binary stars and wonky planetary nursery
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Chelsea Whyte
5y ago
This mixed-up star system has an unusual set of orbitsUniversity of Warwick/Mark Garlick By Chelsea WhyteThere is a star system 146 light years from Earth that is quite strange. At its centre is a set of binary stars, and around that loops another binary pair. In between is a ring of dust and gas that’s set at a very odd angle. The dust and gas of this system, which is called HD 98800, are part of a disc that may be forming planets in a kind of cosmic nursery. Instead of lying on the same plane as the central stars, this disc’s orbit is perpendicular to that (pictured above). The full system i ..read more
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A cosmic collision may be coming for our galaxy sooner than we thought
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Leah Crane
5y ago
The Large Magellanic Cloud looks set to collide with our galaxyNASA By Leah CraneThe Milky Way is facing a violent path towards normalcy. A new simulation predicts that our galaxy will collide with the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud in about 2.4 billion years, a smashup that will actually make the Milky Way more similar to its galactic counterparts. Our galaxy is not a normal spiral galaxy for several reasons. For its size, its central black hole seems to be an order of magnitude too small; its stellar halo has far fewer heavy elements than other spiral galaxies; and its biggest satellite galax ..read more
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Geraint Lewis: What is the fate of our universe?
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Anne Marie Conlon
5y ago
The universe will eventually come to an end, but will it be with a bang, a whimper, or something else? Astrophysicist Geraint Lewis has the answer ..read more
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Chamkaur Ghag: The hunt for dark matter
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Anne Marie Conlon
5y ago
Dark matter is the mysterious glue that holds everything together – but will we ever pin down its true nature? Astrophysicist Chamkaur Ghag thinks we will ..read more
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Emma Chapman: The first stars in the universe
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Sam Wong
5y ago
Astrophysicist Emma Chapman explains how she is peering back into the depths of time to reveal what the first ever stars can tell us ..read more
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The Higgs boson may have stopped the early universe from collapsing
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Timothy Revell
5y ago
The Higgs boson could help explain the moments after the big bangScience Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo By Leah CraneThe Higgs boson may be key to understanding the first moments of the universe. If the early universe was too disordered, everything would have collapsed into black holes moments after the big bang. Luckily, this didn’t happen, and some new calculations suggest the Higgs boson could be the reason why. Near the start of the beginning of the universe, everything was compressed into a very small space. Then, a process called inflation took over, rapidly expanding space ..read more
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How to think about… The multiverse
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Legacy content author
5y ago
By Daniel Cossins JUST don’t say they made it up. “One of the most common misconceptions is that the multiverse is a hypothesis,” says Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In fact, it is forced upon us. “It is a prediction of theories we have good reason to think are correct.” The idea that the already vast universe we can see is just one of perhaps infinitely many we can’t is certainly a lot to swallow. And it doesn’t stop there. The multiverse itself comes in many guises. Get your head around the most mind-bending concepts in science From black holes to blockc ..read more
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The Milky Way has devoured 15 other galaxies since it formed
New Scientist » Astrophysics
by Niall Firth
5y ago
Our galaxy is very hungryNASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, and STScI By Leah CraneNo galaxy is an island, and the Milky Way is no exception. After our galaxy began to form, it merged with about 15 other galaxies to build up what we see today. A study of star clusters has identified three of them – two that are still in the process of being absorbed now, and a third bigger one that hadn’t been identified before, that has been nicknamed Kraken. Globular clusters are dense groups of old stars that are found in most massive galaxies. The evolution ..read more
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