10 Features
One of the fundamental laws of the universe is the conservation of Energy. Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, and all is transformed. And so the death of the original stars brought forth new stars which then died again, adding heavier elements than hydrogen to the composition of the univer...
10 Features
Our 7th feature is about elliptical galaxies. Elliptical galaxies are the other main class of galaxies we find in our universe. They have a spherical stellar distribution, meaning simply that their stars’ orbits are not in a plane any more, and instead have random orientations.
Big Bang
On the 4th of February a paper was published detailing a Universe that didn’t need a Big Bang. While it is very interesting (you can read it here) I find myself once again at odds with how theoretical papers are formulated.
10 Features
As we’ve seen in the previous vlog, spiral Galaxies started forming from the primordial protogalaxies about 11 billion years ago. The formation of spiral galaxies is important because it happened at the peak of population II stars formation and allowed for planets to form.
AstroNews
The oldest exoplanetary star-system has been discovered by Kepler. The system orbiting Kepler 444 was older than the Earth today when the Sun first shone light.
10 Features
Another important feature in the history of Universe are the proto-galaxies. In the last 30 years we were able to observe only a few dozen of these proto or primeval galaxies, which mostly looked like shapeless blobs with an intense UV emission.
Asteroid
6th of March – Dawn arrives at Ceres. The space probe Dawn, which recently took some stunning pictures of the asteroid Vesta, will encounter Ceres in March. Ceres is the largest object in the Asteroid Belt and the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system. It has a diameter of 950 km and a […]
10 Features
The Universe coming out of the cosmic dark ages was a bleak place. The afterglow of the Big Bang had slipped into infrared radiation and neutral hydrogen was a mist stretching the entire cosmos. But as we learnt, stars soon started shining, piercing and breaking that mist giving way to the Epoch ...
Astronomy
Obviously there are no cows on Mars but NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover detected an increase of methane in the atmosphere and organic molecules from the soil during one of its drilling sessions. The findings were presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Curiosity data sho...
How About That?
Almost 110 years ago our view of time was changed forever. Time wasn’t part of the immutable stage of life but it was an active player. We finally understood how to squeeze time and how to stretch it thanks to a German patent officer named Albert Einstein.
10 Features
The third feature is about Population III stars. These stars are the first lights that shone in the Universe. These stars no longer exist, but affected the environment of the early Universe. They formed between a million and 10 million years after the Big Bang and they were made almost exclusive...
10 Features
The cosmic microwave background or CMB is my second feature for this series. The CMB is formed by the original photons produced in the Big Bang and was created at the last scattering surface.