Only four days into the New Year and the first four exoplanets of 2012 have been spotted orbiting four distant stars.
A new image of the Omega Nebula, captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), is one of the sharpest of this object ever taken from the ground. It shows the dusty, rose-coloured central parts of this famous stellar nursery and reveals extraordinary detail in the cosmic landscape of gas clouds, dust and newborn stars.
Just in time for the holidays, astronomers have come across a new image from NASA
The hunt for elusive neutrinos will soon get its largest and most powerful tool yet: the enormous KM3NeT telescope, currently under development by a consortium of 40 institutions from ten European countries. Once completed KM3NeT will be the second-largest structure ever made by humans, after the Great Wall of China, and taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai… but submerged beneath 3,200 feet of ocean!
A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer.
The first two Earth-like worlds orbiting another star have been detected, although neither are believed to be suitable for life.
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered a gas cloud with several times the mass of the Earth accelerating fast towards the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. This is the first time ever that the approach of such a doomed cloud to a supermassive black hole has been observed. The results will be published in the 5 January 2012 issue of the journal Nature.
(PhysOrg.com) -- On 15 November 2011, the Effelsberg 100-meter radio telescope, together with three Russian and one Ukrainian telescope, took part in the first interferometric observations with the orbiting 10-meter antenna Spektr-R of the Russian RadioAstron project. The observations were made at a wavelength of 18 centimeters, targeting the distant, bright, and very compact quasar 0212+735. Interferometric signals have been successfully detected by the RadioAstron team between Spektr-R and the ground antennas, setting a new world record for the size of a radio interferometer and opening a new era in interferometric studies of cosmic radio emission.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Earlier this year, PhysOrg reported on a new idea that suggested that gravitational charges in the quantum vacuum could provide an alternative to dark matter. The idea rests on the hypothesis that particles and antiparticles have gravitational charges of opposite sign. As a consequence, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs in the quantum vacuum form gravitational dipoles (having both a positive and negative gravitational charge) that can interact with baryonic matter to produce phenomena usually attributed to dark matter. Although CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic, who proposed the idea, mathematically demonstrated that these gravitational dipoles could explain the observed rotational curves of galaxies without dark matter in his initial study, he noted that much more work needed to be done.
Two gargantuan black holes -- weighing in at nearly 10 billion times the mass of our sun -- have been discovered, possibly revealing a "missing link" in the galactic evolution puzzle.
