News by Subject Space & Planetary

Dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the material universe, continues to vex scientists, but three creative studies using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have helped whittle down some possibilities.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered two tiny dwarf galaxies that have wandered from a vast cosmic wilderness into a nearby 'big city' packed with galaxies. After being quiescent for billions of years, they are ready to party by starting a firestorm of star birth.

In a paper to appear in upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, the international team of astronomers reports that they were able to achieve four times better precision in measurements of how the universe's visible matter is clustered together by studying the empty spaces in between.

In a new study, astronomers have accurately measured the light hitting the Earth from outside our galaxy and determined that 10 trillionths of your suntan comes from beyond our galaxy.

The small smattering of bright blue stars in the upper left of this 615 megapixel ESO image is the perfect cosmic laboratory in which to study the life and death of stars. Known as Messier 18 this star cluster contains stars that formed together from the same massive cloud of gas and dust. This image was captured by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) located at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Some of the most abundant particles in the universe are the so-called ghost particles, neutrinos. Researchers have identified three types of neutrinos, but they have been searching for one more type, which would explain mysterious phenomena like dark matter. After analyzing thousands of neutrinos in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute can now confirm that there is no evidence for the existence of sterile neutrinos.

In an effort to fill in the blanks of the Standard Model of particle physics, science has been conducting a diligent search for a hypothesized particle known as the 'sterile neutrino.' Now, with the latest results from the IceCube particle detector at the South Pole, scientists are almost certain that there is no such particle.

UCLA astronomers have made the first accurate measurement of the abundance of oxygen in a distant galaxy. 'We're looking back in time at this galaxy as it appeared 12 billion years ago,' said Alice Shapley, a UCLA professor of astronomy.