We’ve all seen lighthouses on Earth, a spinning light atop a tower that is meant to keep ships from coming to close ashore at night. These lighthouses are designed to keep ships away and out of danger, but did you know that the universe has its own version of a lighthouse? These...
nebula billions of years ago. TheUniverseis 13.8 billion years old, and the generally accepted view is thatthe Sunand the Solar System are only 5 billion years old, give or take. What was happening in the eight billion years between the start of the Universe and the start of the Solar ...
Roughly 80% of all of the mass in the universe is made up of what scientists have dubbed "dark matter," but it's not known what it actually is or if it is even matter by our current definition. However, while dark matter doesn't emit light or energy and cannot, therefore, be direc...
Main Sequence stars can be referred to as Dwarf stars as they are smaller than the giant stars out there. UY Scuti, currently the largest known star in the Universe is over 1,7800 times the size of the Sun and if that doesn't make it a dwarf star, nothing will. ...
The light emitted by a pulsar carries information about these objects and what is happening inside them. That means pulsars give scientists information about the physics of neutron stars, which are the densest material in the universe (with the exception of whatever happens to matter inside a blac...
The Andromeda galaxy, which is the nearest large galaxy to ours, is nearly 800,000 parsecs away. The observable universe is filled with galaxies. The distances to most of them are measured in millions, or even billions, of parsecs.
How big is the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope? What are gamma ray telescopes used for? What has the Hubble Telescope discovered about the universe? What did the Hubble Space Telescope discover in 1990? What did the Hubble Telescope discover about our galaxy?
A PULSAR is a type of neutron star that emits energy in pulses, sort of like a light beam from a lighthouse. When a massive star dies and collapses, it can form a STELLAR BLACK HOLE. The gravity of a black hole is so strong that it even pulls in light.Privacy...
First observations for the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project were carried out in February 2004. The project is ongoing and we currently observe approximately every three weeks. The data have led to numerous scientific results on topics as diverse as the solar wind, gravitational waves, measuring ...
Using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the pair observed several terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsarPSR B1257+12. It was not until 1995 that the first exoplanet confirmation around a main-sequence star was made. In this case, the planet observed was51 Pegasi b, a giant planet...