It took 13 billion years to reach Earth, but astronomers have seen the light of an exploding mega-star that is the most distant object ever detected, two studies report.

 

 

Source: Cosmos Online – click here for full article

 

 

Mysterious gaps in the asteroid belt may have been caused by a shift in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn four billion years ago, researchers say.

A computer simulation of the gravitational influence of these migrating planets matches previously unexplained gaps in the belt, according to a report published in the British journal Nature today.

“The pattern in the missing asteroids confirms other lines of evidence that the giant planets went through a brief episode of migration some time in the Solar System’s early history,” said David Minton study co-author and astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, USA.

Source: Cosmos Online – click here for full article

 

 

LONDON: An intense star-forming region that produces a combined mass of more than one thousand solar masses a year has been found 12.8 billion light-years from Earth.

The so-called ‘hyper-starburst’ is part of a young, quasar-containing galaxy. Because it is so far away, we can only see how the galaxy appeared far into the past, when the universe was less than a billion years old.

Limits of physics

This fledgling galaxy produces 1,000 times more star matter than our galaxy, and within a diameter of just 4,000 light-years, compared with the Milky Way’s 100,000 light-years.

It helps confirm a theory that young galaxies can grow massive very rapidly.

“The star-forming rate we observed is as high as it gets,” said lead author Fabian Walter, a astrophysicist from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “Physics wouldn’t allow a higher star-formation rate.” [...]

 

Source: Cosmos Online – click here for full article