Astrophysics

Hexaquark d*(2380): a new candidate for dark matter Astrophysics
Mar 19 2020

Hexaquark d*(2380): a new candidate for dark matter

One of the biggest mysteries of our universe is what is dark matter made of. Its existence is suggested by several astronomical observations, among them peculiarities in the rotation of galaxies. Dark matter would have to make up at least 63% of all matter in the universe and to date, physicists have no idea about its exact nature. All that is clear is that dark matter interacts with normal matter only via gravity. These could be, among other things, so-called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which would be considered cold dark matter. However, researchers are not making very quick…
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Cosmic strings and our existence in the universe Astrophysics
Mar 11 2020

Cosmic strings and our existence in the universe

The Big Bang was the beginning of this, our universe. Astrophysicists agree on that much at least. Whether it was or will be the only event of this type is a debate for philosophers. But there are still a few unresolved questions involving the Big Bang. The most important of these would probably be: why do we exist at all? Because after all the four fundamental forces finally developed after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should always be formed in exactly the same amount. The evolution of the universe would thus be relatively boring: matter and antimatter would…
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Sleeping monster from the early days of the universe Astrophysics
Mar 9 2020

Sleeping monster from the early days of the universe

At first glance, XMM-2599 appears to be a rather boring galaxy (because it’s dying). But an international research team has recently discovered that it’s really a sleeping monster. XMM-2599 formed more than 12 billion years ago, when the universe was still very young, only 1.8 billion years old. At first the galaxy was extremely active. “Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy,” says Benjamin Forrest, lead author of the study in Astrophysical Journal. “More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed…
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The dramatic end of a starry couple Astrophysics
Feb 12 2020

The dramatic end of a starry couple

The death fight between two stars has been captured in pictures by astronomers with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). The gas cloud, which appears to consist of multiple rings, is the remains of the binary star system HD101584. “A nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant,” explains Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who is the lead author of a study on this object, now published in the journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics. The ALMA image shows vividly what happened during this confrontation, described in a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which…
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Galaxy group from the epoch of reionization discovered Astrophysics
Jan 23 2020

Galaxy group from the epoch of reionization discovered

The universe has a 13.8 billion year long history behind it. Astronomers have already found lots of evidence to support the current model, but the more evidence there is for a theory, the better. To observe the formation of the universe, astronomers use actual time machines – their telescopes. The farther an object is away from us, the longer its light takes to reach us, and thus the farther back in time the light we are now seeing was created. An international research group has now succeeded in observing the most distant galaxy group to date. “EGS77” is a…
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Strange objects at the center of the Milky Way Astrophysics
Jan 22 2020

Strange objects at the center of the Milky Way

Sometimes they behave like a cloud of gas and then they’ll start behaving again almost like an ordinary star: the so-called “G-objects,” which astronomers describe in an article in the scientific journal Nature, are hard to fit into any single category. Six of these objects have already been identified by researchers. They were all found in the direct vicinity of the center of our Milky Way – orbiting the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. This point of commonality probably also contributes to their strange behavior. G1 to G6 have orbits that lead them around the black hole once every…
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Hubble detects small clumps of dark matter Astrophysics
Jan 21 2020

Hubble detects small clumps of dark matter

Dark matter holds galaxies together and gives the visible universe its structure. Even though it makes up about five-sixths of all the mass in the cosmos, to date nobody has been able to figure out what it’s made of. On the other hand, there have been some indications about what dark matter is not made of, but researchers still need to determine if dark matter is hot, cold, or possibly even fuzzy, with the temperature designation here referring to the speed at which the particles of dark matter are moving. NASA’s Hubble telescope has now pushed the probabilities a…
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Is the universe repelled by itself? Astrophysics
Jan 14 2020

Is the universe repelled by itself?

Does the universe repel itself? That is roughly the idea that researchers from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, Russia proposed in a recent paper. Their paper refers to the Casimir effect, which involves a quantum-physics phenomenon that was predicted and also later confirmed by the Dutch scientist Hendrik Casimir. The Casimir effect causes two conductive plates arranged in parallel in a vacuum to be attracted to each other by a force. The idea that it might be responsible for previously unexplainable phenomena like dark energy is not completely novel. In general, it predicts that hard, fixed…
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