Sep 8, 2008

Dark Energy

Posted in Astronomy at 4:14 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours

Forget the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with its alleged ability to create earth-sucking microscopic black holes, its forthcoming efforts to simulate conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang 100 metres beneath the Swiss countryside. There is a far bigger puzzle facing science that the LHC cannot answer: What is the mysterious energy that seems …

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Jan 1, 2008

A Billion Light Years from Home

Posted in Astronomy at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours

Have you ever come across this kind of description of an astronomical event:

“…astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy…Both galaxies are situated about 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth…The offending galaxy probably began assaulting its companion about 1 million years ago…”

How can that be? asks Sciencebase reader Adam Azman. …

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Aug 3, 2007

We are all made of stars

Posted in Astronomy, Chemistry at 4:00 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment

A cocktail of chemicals is venting in enormous jets from the oxygen-rich surroundings of a supergiant star 5000 light years from earth, according to Arizona radio astronomers. Using the the Arizona Radio Observatory’s 10m Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) on Mount Graham, which is so sensitive it could detect emissions from deep space that are weaker than a typical light bulb, the team has picked up the chemical signatures for a range …

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