The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a unique perspective of the universe, including never-before-seen galaxies that glitter like diamonds in the cosmos.

The new image, shared on Wednesday as part of a study published in the Astronomical Journal, was taken as part of the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science observing program, called PEARLS.

It’s one of the first medium-deep-wide-field images of the universe, with “medium-deep” meaning the faintest objects visible, and “wide-field” referring to the region of the cosmos captured in the image.

Read the entire article here.

Link submitted by Gene Savoy Jr.

A fresh set of 168 geoglyphs have been discovered by researchers in Peru’s intriguing Nazca Lines UNESCO World Heritage Site. The newly found drawings depict humans, camelids, birds, orcas, cats and snakes as well as simple lines and geometrical patterns.

Interestingly, one of the 50 or so human figures in the set is cartoon-like, with big rounded eyes and a stubble-like patch around the mouth, and bears a resemblance to Homer Simpson, the popular American animated sitcom character, reports the Daily Mail !

According to Science Alert , when the Nazca Lines , located in the Nazca Desert some 400 kilometers (249 miles) south of Lima, was designated a World Heritage Site in 1994, only around 30 geoglyphs had been identified and they mostly depicted plants and animals. By 2019 the number had risen to around 200 geoglyphs, several of which were human-like figures. However, Peruvian archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo told The Guardian in 2020, he believed this to be only 5 percent of the total number out there.

Read the entire article here.

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but in September last year a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, said he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

Read the entire article here.

An incredibly bright flash that appeared in the night sky in February was the result of a star straying too close to a supermassive black hole, meeting its untimely end there as it was ripped to shreds.

But the rare cosmic event actually occurred 8.5 billion light years away from Earth, when the universe was just a third of its current age — and it has created more questions than answers.

The signal from the luminous explosion, known as AT 2022cmc, was first picked up by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory on February 11.

Read the entire article at cnn.com.

link submitted by Gene Savoy Jr.

Sean Carroll is a physicist at Caltech. His research includes theoretical physics and astrophysics, especially cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. He has published several research papers dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, violations of Lorentz invariance, extra dimensions, topological defects, cosmic microwave background anisotropies, causality violation, black holes, and the cosmological constant problem.

He is currently focused on the origin of the universe and the arrow of time, including the roles of inflation, baby universes, and quantum gravity. In his recent video by Techinsider, he explains what existed before Big Bang and what it actually means.

Read the entire article here.

Astronomers have been discovering an increasing number of rocky exoplanets, worlds similar in size to Earth. This month (December 15, 2022), an international team of astronomers said it has found two more worlds in our own neighborhood of the galaxy. These worlds are less than 16 light-years away, very close, relatively speaking! And they’re in the habitable zone of their star, the zone within which liquid water can exist.

For comparison, Proxima Centauri b is the closest Earth-mass exoplanet, at 4.2 light-years away. It’s also similar in size to Earth and in its star’s habitable zone.

Read the entire article here.

With a flawlessly symmetrical ring encircling a red sphere of stars, Hoag’s object is one of the most stunning mysteries in the universe.

If you look closely at the serpent constellation in the northern sky, you might notice a galaxy within a galaxy within a galaxy.

This cosmic turducken is known as Hoag’s object, and it has baffled astronomers since astronomer Arthur Hoag found it in 1950.

The object under consideration is a one-of-a-kind, ring-shaped galaxy 100,000 light-years across (slightly larger than the Milky Way) and 600 million light-years away from Earth.

Read the entire article here.

While walking and talking with a friend who was a mechanical engineer, he asked me, what is science? Great question, which eventually led us to talking about what is lacking in today’s science. I proposed that when an astronomer looks at a beautiful nebula, the first question should be, what is the function of that?

View the video here.

Watch the video here.

The ripples in space-time generated by colliding black holes have taught us a lot aboυt these enigmatic objects.
These gravitational waves encode information about black holes: their masses, the shape of their inward spiral towards each other, their spins, and their orientations.
From this, scientists ascertained that most of the collisions we’ve seen have been between black holes in binary systems. The two black holes started as a binary of massive stars that tυrned into black holes together, then spiraled in and merged.
Of the 90 or so mergers detected so far, however, one stands out as very pecυliar. Detected in May 2019, GW19052 emitted space-time ripples like no other.

Read the entire article here.