Tag Archives: big bang

Space Station to Host New Cosmic Ray Telescope

By Guest PostMarch 13, 2013Sciencealan watson, angela olinto, atmosphere, auger project, big bang, center, cosmic ray detector, cosmic ray telescope, decaying particles, delaware, earth atmosphere, earth based detectors, international project, iss, james cronin, japanese experiment module, light emissions, light speed, marshall space flight, NASA, nobel laureate, observatory in argentina, physicist john linsley, space station, stagg field, supermassive black holes, tennis ball, the universe, ultra high energy, university of chicago, university of leeds

UChicago’s Angela Olinto leads U.S. collaboration on international project

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has awarded $4.4 million to a collaboration of scientists at five United States universities and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to help build a telescope for deployment on the International Space Station in 2017.

The U.S. collaboration is part of a 13-nation effort to build the 2.5-meter ultraviolet telescope, called the Extreme Universe Space Observatory. UChicago Prof. Angela Olinto leads the U.S. collaboration. The telescope will search for the mysterious source of the most energetic particles in the universe, called ultra high-energy cosmic rays, from the ISS’s Japanese Experiment Module. The source of these cosmic rays has remained one of the great mysteries of science since physicist John Linsley discovered them more than 50 years ago. These cosmic rays consist of protons and other subatomic scraps of matter that fly through the universe at almost light speed. (more…)

Big Bang Meets Big Data: South Africa Joins ASTRON and IBM to Build the Foundation for a New Era of Computing

By Guest PostMarch 12, 2013Science, Technology13 billion years, 3d stacked chips, astron, australia, big bang, big data, big data challenge, cognitive systems, computing, dome, drenthe, dutch ministry, economic affairs, exascale computer systems, exascale technology, human capital development, ibm, institute, national research foundation, new era, nrf, radio astronomy, simon ratcliffe, ska, ska phase 2, ska project, South Africa, square kilometer array, Technology, the netherlands

South African scientists to develop rugged microservers to handle the harsh desert conditions, explore new computer architectures and develop advanced algorithms for radio astronomy imaging

Pretoria, South Africa – 11 Mar 2013: Square Kilometer Array (SKA) South Africa, a business unit of the country’s National Research Foundation is joining ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM in a four-year collaboration to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems aimed at developing advanced technologies for handling the massive amount of data that will be produced by the SKA, which is one of the most ambitious science projects ever undertaken.

The SKA is an international effort to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, which is to be located in Southern Africa and Australia to help better understand the history of the universe. The project constitutes the ultimate Big Data challenge, and scientists must produce major advances in computing to deal with it. The impact of those advances will be felt far beyond the SKA project—helping to usher in a new era of computing, which IBM calls the era of cognitive systems. (more…)

Infant Galaxy Offers Peek at Early Universe

By Guest PostSeptember 25, 2012Science1149 jd, astronomer, big bang, clash, cluster, cosmic, dark matter, Galaxy, gravitational lens, gravity, hubble telescope, light, macs, mass, megan donahue, michigan, Milky Way, NASA, northern hemisphere, object, ordinary galaxy, sky, space telescope, spitzer, state university, universe, zoom lens

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A Michigan State University astronomer is part of an international team of scientists that has discovered a galaxy so far, far away that its light was emitted not all that long after the Big Bang occurred.

The research of MSU’s physics and astronomy professor Megan Donahue and colleagues is detailed in the recent issue of the journal Nature. They found that this galaxy began emitting light “just” 490 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 3.6 percent of its present age. (more…)

NSF’s South Pole Telescope Discovers a Galaxy Cluster Creating Stars at a Record Pace

By Guest PostAugust 16, 2012Scienceantarctic program, Antarctica, big bang, black hole, blanco 4 meter, bradford benson, chandra, Chile, cmb, cosmic microwave background, earth, energy, galaxy cluster, hubble fellow, john carlstrom, light year, magellan telescope, michael mcdonald, NASA, national science foundation, nsf, phoenix cluster, radiation, radio telescope, south pole telescope, spt, spt clj2344-4243, sunyaev zeldovich, sz effect, university of chicago, xray observatory

Researchers say Phoenix Cluster activity may cause scientists to rethink how galaxies evolve

A National Science Foundation-funded radio telescope in Antarctica has found an extraordinary galaxy cluster that may force astronomers to rethink how galaxy clusters and the galaxies that inhabit them evolve.

The galaxy cluster was discovered some 5.7 billion light years from Earth by the 10-meter wide South Pole Telescope (SPT) located at NSF’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, which is funded by NSF’s Office of Polar Programs. (more…)

Astronomers Using the Hubble Space Telescope Report the Earliest Spiral Galaxy Ever Seen

By Guest PostJuly 19, 2012Sciencealice shapley, astronomer, big bang, bx442, charles steidel, david law, dawn erb, early universe, elliptical galaxy, hawaii, Hubble Space Telescope, james larkin, journal nature, keck observatory, mauna kea volcano, Milky Way, naveen reddy, osiris spectrograph, spiral galaxy, universe

Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. In findings reported July 19 in the journal Nature, the astronomers said they discovered it while using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of about 300 very distant galaxies in the early universe and to study their properties. This distant spiral galaxy is being observed as it existed roughly three billion years after the Big Bang, and light from this part of the universe has been traveling to Earth for about 10.7 billion years.

“As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric,” said Alice Shapley, a UCLA associate professor of physics and astronomy, and co-author of the study. “The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?” (more…)

NASA’s Spitzer Finds First Objects Burned Furiously

By Guest PostJune 9, 2012Sciencealexander sasha kashlinsky, ancient era, big bang, cosmic fuel, cosmic infrared background, expansion, faint objects, first objects, giovanni fazio, glenn wahlgren, harvey moseley, infrared wavelengths, james webb, john mather, los angeles, massive stars, matt ashby, mysterious sources, NASA, nearby universe, new york city, pattern of light, richard arendt, sky, space telescope, spitzer space telescope, ultraviolet wavelengths, universe, voracious black holes

PASADENA, Calif. — The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.

The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel.

“These objects would have been tremendously bright,” said Alexander “Sasha” Kashlinsky of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a new paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal. “We can’t yet directly rule out mysterious sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe, but it is now becoming increasingly likely that we are catching a glimpse of an ancient epoch. Spitzer is laying down a roadmap for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Telescope, which will tell us exactly what and where these first objects were.” (more…)

‘Time Machine’ Will Study the Early Universe

By Guest PostApril 14, 2012Scienceastronomer, big bang, black hole, brown dwarfs, caltech, charles steidel, cosmic dust, dark matter, david clarke, electromagnetic spectrum, era, families of galaxies, formation, Galaxy, gamma ray, gregory mace, harland epps, hawaii, ian s mclean, infrared camera, infrared wavelength, jupiter, keck i telescope, keith matthews, kristin kulas, lee a dubridge, mauna kea, milky way galaxy, missing link, mosfire, nirspec, radio wave, redshifted, sean adkins, spectrometer, time machine, ucla, universe, w m keck observatory

UCLA’s Ian McLean, colleagues build most advanced instrument of its kind

A new scientific instrument, a “time machine” of sorts, built by UCLA astronomers and colleagues, will allow scientists to study the earliest galaxies in the universe, which could never be studied before.

The five-ton instrument, the most advanced and sophisticated of its kind in the world, goes by the name MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) and has been installed in the Keck I Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. (more…)

Clocking an Accelerating Universe: First Results from BOSS

By Guest PostApril 4, 2012Scienceaccelerate, adam riess, apache point observatory, bao, baryon acoustic oscillation, berkeley lab, beth reid, big bang, brian schmidt, cmb, cosmic microwave background, dan long, dark energy, david schlegel, density peak, einstein, eric huff, euclidean universe, Galaxy, george smoot, gravitational attraction, gravity, high z supernova, hubble, martin white, megaparsecs, Milky Way, new mexico, nobel prize, phenomenon, redshifts, saul perlmutter, scp, sdss, sloan telescope, spectrograph, statistical analysis, universe, zosia rostomian

Berkeley Lab scientists are the leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on.

Some six billion light years distant, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been expanding ever more slowly. Then, as matter spread out and its density decreased, dark energy took over and expansion began to accelerate.

Today BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), announced the most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy turned on. (more…)