Stars, Universe | featured news

Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe said on Wednesday they were closing in on the long-sought but elusive Higgs boson they believe was key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life.

European astronomers report galaxies likely merged and churned out metal-rich stars, early in the universe. From 12 billion light years distance, the gamma ray burst, GRB 090323, was spotted by NASA satellites and then Earthly telescopes in 2009 (one light year equals 5.9 trillion miles). The blast appears to have originated in one galaxy and pierced another nearby on its way o Earth, report European Southern Observatory astronomers.

Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating....

Late in 2009 year we witnessed the largest explosion ever recorded: a super giant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production.

Astronomers have underestimated the number of galaxies in parts of the Universe by as much as 90 per cent, according to a study, suggesting billions of stars are yet to be recorded.

It took 13 billion years to reach Earth, but astronomers have seen the light of an exploding mega-star that is the most distant object ever detected, two studies published Thursday reported.

Completing an orbit in less than an Earth day, planet Wasp-18b should have burned up, according to accepted theory. Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.

It may not be possible to travel back in time, but seeing stars and galaxies as they looked millions or even billions of years ago is no problem thanks to telescopes, the closest thing we have to time machines.

A distant "sun" residing in the constellation Aquila has become the smallest star known to host a planet.

Astronomers have spotted a burst of energy from a dying star, setting a record for the oldest and most distant object seen by Earth yet.

The 10-second blast was from when the universe was only 630 million years old.
NASA's Swift satellite spotted the gamma-ray burst, an explosion of high-powered radiation, on April 23. Then ground telescopes watched the afterglow and calculated it had traveled about 13.1 billion light years to get here. It beat old records by 100 or 200 hundred million light years.