Astronomers say the discovery of drifting quasars from the early universe are challenging our understanding of how these massive, luminous, and extremely distant objects could have formed, according to new findings made possible by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Quasars are extremely bright celestial objects that are believed to possess massive black holes, and some…

photo by: University of Kansas KU astronomy professor Elisabeth Mills’ proposed space probe, PRIMA, has been chosen by NASA for funding and further investigation. <!– SHOW ARTICLE –> A space probe concept with a KU team member has moved on to the next stage of evaluation for a $1 billion mission set to launch into…

Telstar 1Telstar 1, launched July 10, 1962, relayed the first transatlantic television signals.(more) Although some early space experiments explored the use of large orbiting satellites as passive reflectors of signals from point to point on Earth, most work in the late 1950s and early ’60s focused on the technology by which a signal sent from…

A new study has revealed that some quasars were surprisingly alone in the early universe, confounding astronomers. This image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows an ancient quasar (circled in red) with fewer than expected neighboring galaxies (bright blobs), challenging physicists’ understanding of how the first quasars and supermassive black holes formed. Credit:…

The Dog Tooth of Time by Sarah Al Sarraj. Photo: Sarah Al SarrajThe Dog Tooth of Time by Sarah Al Sarraj. Photo: Sarah Al Sarraj British-Iraqi artist Sarah Al Sarajj hopes to break the National Space Centre’s silence on the contributions of medieval Islamic scholars to modern astronomy

A quasar is the extremely bright core of a galaxy that hosts an active supermassive black hole at its center. As the black hole draws in surrounding gas and dust, it blasts out an enormous amount of energy, making quasars some of the brightest objects in the universe. Quasars have been observed as early as…

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An issue that arises when one contemplates the universe at large is whether space and time are infinite or finite. After many centuries of thought by some of the best minds, humanity has still not arrived at conclusive answers to these questions. Aristotle’s answer was that the material universe must be spatially finite, for if…

Are we alone in the universe? Are there other technological civilizations out there and how can we find them? This is what a recent preprint submitted to The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers led by Penn State University investigated new methods for detecting radio signals from extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETIs).…

Peppered throughout the universe are balls of gas that never got promoted to stardom. In a strange twist, evidence has just emerged that the most famous of these orbs is actually a double-act. Where astronomers thought there was one brown dwarf, there’s actually two. And the object they studied isn’t just any ordinary brown dwarf.…