It has been suggested that 80% of all matter in the Universe cannot be detected. It has been called Dark Matter, an all encompassing term that covers a lot of different theories about what this matter might actually be. There are also others who claim that Dark Mater does not exist and that there are alternative explanations for why elements in the Universe behave as they do.
While the moon swings around the Earth, we have enough time for work, dinner, and a movie. The Earth barely swirls more than half a solar circuit and we’re already thinking about Christmas presents. But what about the Sun? How come we never think about what the Sun gets up to? Is it not travelling around something? And if so, what could a human being manage to get done on one of those days?
The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has small cliffs that stretch across the landscape for months at a time. Keep Reading
Parts of the Earth may have originally been from another part of the galaxy, having crossed light years to form what we stand upon right now. This is the suggestion of research that says that the Milky Way should be full of flying rocks like Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid that visited our solar system in October 2017, and they may act as triggers and also as the ingredients to form planets in developing planetary systems.
I had not realised that one could easily see a planet in the sky, even a large one such as Jupiter. And now I know that Galileo had four centuries previously identified four moons orbiting the planet, and yet Jupiter only came into my orbit this summer. Keep Reading
LOFAR is an interconnected series of radio telescopes that form the world’s largest radio telescope. Though most of the sites are based in the Netherlands, many are elsewhere including the most westerly antenna in the park at Birr Castle.
NASA’s InSight lander, which arrived on the Red Planet in November 2018, is making measurements of Mars’s magnetic field from the surface, which may help us find water deep underground. While this might trigger thoughts of dowsing there are some scientific reasoning behind the idea.
Scientists have obtained the first image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87.