#cosmic-sounds

#cosmic-sounds

The film then reversed the trick and zoomed back toward that Chicago couple and into their bodies to show the equally breathtaking world of our insides, down to the molecular and atomic level.

Eileen Collins stated, 'The space shuttle flights were normally one to two weeks, and we were very busy. It seemed like we were always behind schedule. When I listen to music, I really get into it, so listening while I'm working doesn't work.'

The proposed scale of orbital deployment would represent a significant alteration of the natural night-time light environment at a planetary scale.

The atmosphere of TOI 5205b has a lower concentration of heavy elements relative to hydrogen than gas giants in our own solar system, suggesting something different about its formation.

This system is truly extraordinary. We are seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. This galaxy acts as a lens, the way a water droplet on a window pane would, because its mass curves the local space-time. So we have a radio laser passing through a cosmic telescope before being detected by the powerful MeerKAT radio telescope.

The closest supermassive black hole pair, in NGC 7727, was discovered in 2021. Just 89 million light-years away, these 154,000,000- and 6,300,000-solar-mass black holes are just 1,600 light-years apart. Approximately 0.1% of young quasars are expected to be doubles, with typical separations of ~10,000 light-years.

Light is one aspect of the Universe that, for most people, holds a deep and noticeable value in everyday life, helping them to navigate, learn from, and connect with the world around them. Yet it's not particularly difficult to imagine life without it. After all, many nonhuman animals live in lightless environments. However, as Gideon Koekoek, an associate professor of physics in the research group Gravitational Waves and Fundamental Physics

an electron within a molecule gets excited to a higher-energy state, the electron de-transitions back to the lower energy state, where it emits light of a very specific wavelength in the process. Then, pumped or injected energy re-excites an electron within that very same molecule back into that higher-energy state, over and over.

This system is truly extraordinary. We're seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. Fundamentally, masers and lasers are focused beams of light in the same frequency. In the realm of astrophysics, these can arise from clouds of dust being excited into a higher energy state from the light emitted by other sources, like stars and black holes.

One of the most exciting aspects is the rich chemistry we detect. We see dozens of different molecules, including some complex organic molecules that contain carbon, the same element that forms the basis of life on Earth. From ACES, we are learning more about how the ingredients for planets, and potentially life itself, can arise in the universe.

Looking skyward fills us with wonder. Off-world, the Sun, planets, stars, and galaxies all await. Our Solar System encompasses our own cosmic backyard. Farther away, stars and star clusters abound within the Milky Way. Hundreds of billions of stars exist just within our home galaxy. Inside our Local Group, only Andromeda surpasses us in mass, size, and stars. More than 5 million light-years away, galaxies abound in groups and clusters.

A bright star in a nearby galaxy has essentially vanished. Astronomers believe that it died and collapsed in on itself, transforming into the eerie cosmic phenomenon known as a black hole. "It used to be one of the brightest stars in the Andromeda galaxy," says Kishalay De, an astronomer with Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute. "Today, it is nowhere to be seen, even with the most sensitive telescopes."

The universe is exploding. Or parts of it are. The night sky may seem calm, even serene, but that masks events of a catastrophic and nearly unimaginable scale. Across the galaxy and even the cosmos itself, immense outbursts of energy occur that could easily vaporize our planet. Happily, space is vast, and the terrible distance between these events and us diminishes what we see to a faint glowusually.

A dead star 730 light years away appears to be forming a powerful structure around itself - and despite their best efforts, astronomers aren't sure how. The cosmic corpse, designated RXJ0528+2838, is an incredibly dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf, with a Sun-like star orbiting around it. This binary arrangement isn't uncommon throughout the universe, but what is strange is the structure surrounding the former body: a highly energetic and luminescent cloud known as a nebula,

The first time that University of Oxford astronomer Lyla Jung saw the cosmic configuration on her monitor, she almost didn't believe it was real. But it wasand Jung and her colleagues went on to identify one of the largest rotating structures ever found in space: a chain of galaxies embedded in a spinning cosmic filament 400 million light-years from Earth. The finding, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may give astronomers new insights into galaxies' formation, evolution and diversity, Jung says.

Okay, first thing first: the universe is in fact expanding. We've known this for more than a century now, and it's the basis for modern cosmology. This idea is called the big bang modelwhich is an unfortunate name because it brings to mind a cosmos expanding like an explosion, with galaxies moving away from each other through space like shrapnel. But in fact space itself is expanding, and that's different.

Each time we've looked at the Universe in a fundamentally new way, we didn't just see more of what we already knew what was out there. In addition, those novel capabilities allowed the Universe to surprise us, breaking records, revolutionizing our view of what was out there, and teaching us information that we never could have learned without collecting that key data.