astrophysics

In November of last year, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory switched on Roadrunner, the world's fastest computer. IBM and the Department of Energy built the machine to model nuclear explosions, but two new studies, both released today, are proof that the computer's massive power has been at least as devoted to peaceful science as to simulating thermonuclear weapons.

While Robert Frost famously said that he prefers the world to end in fire, physicists have long predicted the universe will end with an icy sputter known as "heat death." Heat death occurs when the universe finally uses up all its energy, with all motion stopping and all the atoms in creation grinding to a halt. And, based on new calculations from a team of Australian physicists, it looks like heat death is far closer than previously thought.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that cosmologists use to fill gaps in our model of why our universe continues its ever-faster expansion. But now two mathematicians have found a way to explain those baffling observations of the universe without the dark energy question mark hanging overhead.

For decades, astronomers have known that the vast regions of intergalactic gas and dust known as nebulae served as the womb of stars. They theorized that under the relentless pull of gravity, the gas of a nebula condenses until critical mass ignites the gas and sparks the birth of a new sun. But while that theory explained the general genesis of stars, no one ventured a guess at which nebula would become a new star when.

For astrophysicists, evidence of dark matter has always seemed to dangle just beyond the grasp of their evidence. Their theories predict it, the motion of galaxies implies it, but direct observation of this caliginous material remains elusive.

Now, new data from NASA's latest space telescope has sparked debate about whether or not dark matter has finally been observed.

If you put a steamy cup of coffee in the refrigerator, it wouldn’t immediately turn cold. Likewise, if the sun simply “turned off” (which is actually physically impossible), the Earth would stay warm—at least compared with the space surrounding it—for a few million years. But we surface dwellers would feel the chill much sooner than that.

The enormous star WOH G64 just got a serious weight reduction. The star is almost 2,000 times as large as our Sun, and it hangs out in the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 163,000 light years away from us. Until recently, scientists thought the mass of WOH G64 was 40 times that of the Sun. But that figure didn't make sense, since the star seemed to be way too cold for something packing that much matter.

ESA astronomers announced this week that they've discovered two more exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, using the space-based COROT observatory. The two new finds are Jupiter-sized gas giants that orbit close to their parent stars.

But the astronomers also reported that COROT has picked up another object that they can't quite explain. This space oddity, COROT-exo-3b, looks to lie somewhere between a brown dwarf and a planet. It may even be a star, though if that's the case, scientists say it would be among the smallest ever detected.

For years, some scientists contended that black holes swallow everything, including the information associated with the particles they suck up, and that this information can never be recovered. The problem with this idea - the chief proponent of which was the legendary Stephen Hawking - is that it violated a law of quantum mechanics.

Astronomers using the Arecibo telescope have discovered a fast-rotating pulsar that doesn't fit the accepted notions of how those exotic, lighthouse-like stellar objects form. Pulsars get their name from the brief beams of light they shoot our way every few milliseconds or more.