Freelance science journalist
The Universe looks very different today compared to how it looked 12 billion years ago. Galaxies once ‘hotspots’ where billions of stars were created are now cosmic graveyards, and exactly what killed these stars has been a mystery until now.
Research published today says these galaxies stopped making stars because of black holes lurking at their centres.
Read more on WIRED
It may look like an abstract shape from a fuzzy space photograph, but a graph published today reveals a fresh insight into a process necessary for life to ever exist.
Stars are created when incredibly huge clouds of gas and dust in the vast spaces in between galaxies, come together under their own weight.
Read more on WIRED
At the very edge of our galaxy, some stars are moving fast enough that they have the energy needed to escape its gravitational clutches. Now, it turns out, ours might not be the first galaxy these stars have escaped from.
Previously, physicists thought these incredibly fast stars were accelerated to such great speeds by the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Read more on WIRED
Of all the stars in the sky, you might assume the closest to the sun would be the easiest to visit. But this may not be the case.
René Heller at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, says we could reach and orbit Sirius, the brightest star in our night sky, in just 69 years. This is despite the fact that it is twice as far away as our nearest stars in the Alpha Centauri system, which would take at least 90 years to reach.
Read more on New Scientist
The debris left behind after stars were born in dramatic explosions has been caught on camera.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma), a group of astronomers has studied the aftermath from an explosive event when two young stars grazed past each other.
Stars form when huge clouds of dust and gas, known as protostars, collapse under their own weight. Thousands of years ago, two protostars in the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), 1,500 light years away, orbited close to one another.
Read more on WIRED
Astronomers have peered back more than 13 billion light years to find a huge mass of glowing stars – the most distant galaxy ever found to contain cosmic dust.
The discovery gives us a completely new look at when the very first stars were ‘born’ and could reveal more about how the Universe expanded.
Read more on WIRED
