Space

  Following on my last article, I'd like to ask the question, weither some day, dark matter might be useful or even vital to a civilisation. This depends on the properties of the stuff,…

An extremely hot, massive young galaxy cluster named ACT-CL J0102-4915 is the largest ever seen in the distant Universe, and has been has been nicknamed El Gordo — the "big" or "fat one" in Spanish.…

  Over in print media today, New Scientist's cover article was on a "new" idea for what dark matter is. Apparently, dark matter should be composed of Dark Atoms, in a theory introduced by…

Time to ring in a new year with pressure waves.  We can see, but not, hear true sonic waves generated from stars, as the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope is finding.  We also get to…

NASA is featuring the first high-resolution images of asteroid Vesta as taken by the DAWN spacecraft during a low-altitude orbit. The images show a very interesting surface, battered with old and…

Galaxies are theorized to have massive black holes at their centers but the one in the Milky Way is the only supermassive black hole  close enough for astronomers to study in detail. A recent…

Type Ia supernovae, the extraordinarily bright "standard candles" astronomers use to measure cosmic growth which led to the theory of dark energy in 1998 and 13 years later to a Nobel Prize  "…

Queue the 'life on other planets' media buzz.  NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered the first super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to our Sun. The host star lies about…

Cosmic particle accelerators may be more efficient than previously thought, according to a discovery which has revealed the initial stages of acceleration for the first time. In space, large magnetic…

Is the author of 'open notebook astronomy' an idiot?  Over at 365DOA, there is a full article on open notebook astronomy.  What is open notebook?  Making your data and your work…