Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way. The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today. The results will be published in the August 6, 2009 issue of the journal Nature, with a companion paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
The Bolshoi simulation is the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe yet made ("bolshoi" is the Russian word for "great" or "grand"). The first two of a series of research papers describing Bolshoi and its implications have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The first data release of Bolshoi outputs, including output from Bolshoi and also the BigBolshoi or MultiDark simulation of a volume 64 times bigger than Bolshoi, has just been made publicly available to the world's astronomers and astrophysicists.
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open source middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.
A team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Princeton, Drexel University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed the first professional scientific organization based entirely in virtual worlds.
Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) conducts professional seminars and popular lectures, among other events, for its growing membership.
The Open Data project is part of the NASA Open Government Initiative, and is intended to improve access to NASA data. This data catalog is a continually-growing listing of publicly available NASA datasets.
Building on the legacy of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and SDSS-II, the SDSS-III Collaboration is working to map the Milky Way, search for extrasolar planets, and solve the mystery of dark energy.
If the core of a massive star provides this rest mass energy, it can generate several hundred times the energy of a thermonuclear supernova. The core collapse of a massive star is associated in current theory will all but one type of supernova.
In addition to sensing distant galaxies made entirely of antimatter, the AMS will also test leading theories of dark matter, an invisible and mysterious substance that comprises 83 percent of the matter in the universe. And it will search for strangelets, a theoretical form of matter that's ultra-massive because it contains so-called strange quarks
New results from digital sky surveys highlight more inconsistencies in our understanding of early galaxies, which, in contrast to today's galaxies, were compact and rapidly moving.
New findings show that the giant clouds of dust and gas that pervade the universe, out of which form all of the stars and other assorted celestial bodies, depend on magnetism to regulate their collapse. If confirmed, the study would resolve a long-standing mystery about the star-forming process.
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