Cosmology
First of all, I want to thank [~knuten]: his lists gave me the inspiration for this one. Second, this list is just a collection of infos with no claim of objectivity: several etymologies are a mere personal speculation and cannot be verified. The list is constantly under construction, so please feel free to contact me for corrections and/or suggestions. Or just ask me a question, I'll do my best to find an exhaustive answer.
This morning the European Space Agency successfully launched two new science heavyweights — the Herschel Space Observatory and the Planck Surveyor — onto journeys deep into space, where they will begin their much-awaited missions. With its far-infrared vision, Herschel will help astronomers learn more of how stars are born today and how galaxies formed in the early universe. Planck will look even earlier. It should help unravel the origin of the universe as a whole by mapping in new detail the microwaves radiated 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
the crusts of neutron stars are 10 billion times stronger than steel or any other of the earth's strongest metal alloys.
Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than five percent. ...
resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the our home galaxy. The glow in the region covered by the Chandra image was discovered to be caused by hundreds of point-like X-ray sources, implying that the glow along the plane of the Galaxy is due to millions of such sources.
During the last two decades, astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. New research indicates they might have found even more except for one thing — some planets have fallen into their stars and simply no longer exist. [Um... duh.]
Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it tastes vaguely of raspberries. ... While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries....
The Sun is the dimmest it has been for nearly a century. There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time. The observations are baffling astronomers... Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity....
stunning images of Saturn taken by Nasa's Cassini spacecraft show the ringed planet, its moons and rings in the most incredible detail yet.
incredible pictures from Nasa's new telescope show a galaxy of millions.... Scientists believe it could unveil the first gripping evidence of small, rocky planets like the Earth with the right conditions to support life....
planet known as Gliese 581d has a lot more in common with Earth than astronomers first thought. ... New measurements of the planet's orbit place it firmly in a region where conditions would be right for liquid water, and thus life as we know it.... orbits its host in 66.8 days, putting it just inside the cool star's habitable zone....
new instrument that is able to track the transition between the relatively gentle winds of Earth's atmosphere and the more violent flows of charged particles in space... help pinpoint the so-called edge of space... space begins 118 km above Earth...
About 100 million light-years away, in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish), three galaxies are playing a game of gravitational give-and-take that might ultimately lead to their merger into one enormous entity.
The Coma Galaxy Cluster, in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice, is one of the closest very rich collections of galaxies in the nearby Universe. The cluster, also known as Abell 1656, is about 320 million light-years from Earth and contains more than 1000 members. ... NGC 4921 is one of the rare spirals in Coma, and a rather unusual one — it is an example of an "anaemic spiral" where the normal vigorous star formation that creates a spiral galaxy's familiar bright arms is much less intense. As a result there is just a delicate swirl of dust in a ring around the galaxy, accompanied by some bright young blue stars that are clearly separated out by Hubble's sharp vision....
Beautiful photo of double spiral galaxy
It is all thanks to a striking coincidence.
Nicolaus Copernicus's idea that Earth was just one of many planets orbiting the sun - and so occupied no exceptional position in the cosmos - has endured and become a foundation stone of our understanding of the universe. Could it actually be wrong, though? ... According to Ellis and others, our uncertainty about galaxy distances allows an interesting possibility. The distribution of matter could look the same in all directions, but vary with distance from us. In particular, we might be sitting in the middle of a "void" - a vast spherical bubble in an otherwise homogeneous universe. This bubble is not devoid of matter. In fact, most of the stars and galaxies we can see from Earth would be contained within it. It's just that everywhere beyond it, which is too far away to see, the density of stars and galaxies is much higher.
On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says. Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.
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