Space News & Blog Articles

Is there anything more dramatic than an exploding star? More than just extraordinarily bright, energetic events that can light up the sky for months, these explosions play important roles in the cosmos. Supernova create heavy elements and spread them out into their surroundings, where they can be taken up in the next round of planet and star formation.

The cosmic voids of the universe are empty of matter. But we all know there’s more to the universe than just matter. Nothing in this universe is completely empty, and that’s because there’s always your constant companions. Me? No, not me, I only visit once a month.

Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.

A few days ago, I wrote about non-singular black hole models, specifically one known as the Hayward model. Since its introduction in 2006, several variations of the Hayward model have been introduced, including a rotating model similar to the Kerr metric used to study the supermassive black holes we've observed directly. This raises an interesting question: what if we use a rotating Hayward model instead of the usual Kerr model? A recent study answers that question.

There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.