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52 Articles

Birth of the UNIVERSE

“The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that has just ended; a few red whisps, ashes and smoke” Georges Lemaître Meet the experts Name: Richard Davis Role: Professor Head of technology at Jodrell Bank. Led his institution’s involvement in the Planck mission. Name: David Evans Role: Professor Leads the University of Birmingham team on ALICE at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Name: Dan Coe Role: Astronomer Staff astronomer at the STScI, studying galaxy clusters, gravitational lensing and dark matter. The universe almost seems to have come out of nowhere: a concoction of high temperatures and a thick gloop of exotic particles, which would go into an overdrive of expansion through several phases of varying conditions, to create the universe as we see it today, some…

Birth of the UNIVERSE

How it all began

1. The Big Bang The event that is said to have created time and space is thought to have occurred some 13.8 billion years ago. Here the universe was infinitely hot and dense before cooling and inflating. 2. Quark soup One trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the weak and electromagnetic forces separated, leaving us with the four major forces that we know today – strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity. Quarks, leptons and their antimatter particles were also whizzing around and colliding. 3. Big freeze out One hundred seconds after the Big Bang, the temperature dropped to the point where protons and neutrons could stick together without being torn apart. Conditions were ripe for hydrogen to form. 4. Parting company After some 380,000 years, the opaque soup began…

How it all began

Seeing the start

And then there was light. That’s pretty much how our universe sprang into existence; as a point that contained everything and continued to expand through to today, building the first stars and galaxies and stretching light years of distance between them. Despite its name, the Big Bang wasn’t some kind of explosion that spat out matter, energy, time and space. It is imagined almost like a balloon that continues to stretch, originally holding an incredibly hot and dense primordial soup that cooled and thinned out over the space of millions to billions of years. As ever, such an event has opened up a whole deluge of questions. And the only way to attempt to look back in time is to lift missions off the ground to seek answers; providing us…

Seeing the start

How it will end

Closed universe The density of the universe is more than five atoms of hydrogen per cubic metre. There’s no repulsive effect of dark energy and gravity eventually halts the universe’s expansion. With contraction, all the matter in the universe collapses to a point – the Big Crunch Open universe If space is open and curved, the universe will continue to expand forever. Dark energy will help to drive the expansion. The result? Heat death, the Big Freeze or the Big Rip is imminent. Here the universe’s density is less than the critical density. Flat universe With no dark energy, a flat universe will expand forever at a decelerating rate. With dark energy the expansion initially slows thanks to gravity, then speeds up. The universe’s ultimate fate is the same as…

How it will end

Re-creating the Big Bang

Tucked away in the highly populated city of Geneva in Switzerland, the particle-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which is more commonly known as CERN – has been hard at work accelerating particles to breakneck speeds close to the speed of light. The aim? To attempt to re-create what the early universe might have been like just a few minutes after it was born. The particle accelerator, which houses two detectors dedicated to pinpointing the moments during our universe’s growth (LHCb and ALICE), works as a Big Bang-making machine. The differences are that this ‘explosion’ is on a much smaller scale and scientists have a bit more control over it. For ALICE, the aim of the game is to smash particles of…

Re-creating the Big Bang

1. Disappearing antimatter In the beginning, there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter – two materials that, when they come together, annihilate each other. Why, then, does our universe now contain mostly matter? 2. The horizon problem Are the widely separated regions of the sky too far apart to communicate with one another? If they’re unable to communicate, scientists are unsure how they know to have the same temperature. 3. The flatness problem Evidence suggests that the present universe is pretty much flat. Experts think that its current form is a very unlikely result of the universe’s evolution from the Big Bang. 4. Galaxy formation Random bumps in the expanding universe may not be enough to form galaxies. In a rapidly expanding universe, gravitational attraction loses the fight and…

Observing the aftermath

Around 13.8 billion years later, here we are. As the stars, galaxies, planetary systems and other bodies are silently suspended in an endless void of blackness, it is difficult to believe that there was a time in the universe’s life that conditions were chaotic and ever-changing. But there is evidence everywhere and in all directions; the Hubble Deep Field – snapped by the long-serving Hubble Space Telescope – made sure of that. “The Hubble Deep Field revealed distant galaxies which appear very different from nearby galaxies,” explains Dan Coe, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, USA. “They are generally smaller, more clumpy and less orderly than nearby galaxies and yet to form spiral patterns or settle into elliptical balls.” Constructed from a series of observations over…

Observing the aftermath

Big Bang: not just a theory

INTERVIEW BIO Prof James Bock Professor Bock is co-leader of BICEP and, as one of the founders, has been with the project since its inception in 2001 over a game of tennis with astrophysicist Professor Brian Keating. He has worked as a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and specialises in experimental cosmology at the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Could you tell us a bit about the BICEP2 project? What exactly was it you originally set out to do? How did it differ from the original experiment, BICEP, that if followed? BICEP2 is a step in a larger programme. We originally started an experiment back in 2001 called BICEP, which was designed to go after this polarisation signal exclusively. The idea emerged from my talking with a post-doc…

Big Bang: not just a theory

HOW PLANETS FORM

In a sense, planetary birth is a side effect of a larger birth: the formation of a star. Stars form from nebulas, massive clouds of gas and dust dominated by hydrogen and helium. Now and then, a disturbance in a nebula concentrates an area of gas and dust into a denser knot of material. If the knot is big enough and dense enough, it will exert enough gravitational pull to collapse in on itself. The huge volume of super-dense gas concentrates at the knot’s centre, and the gravitational energy heats it up to form a protostar. With sufficient mass, the energy of the protostar increases, eventually initiating a nuclear fusion reaction and graduating to a proper star. Meanwhile, according to the solar nebula theory, surrounding gas and dust form a…

HOW PLANETS FORM

Origins of a solar system

Gas giant, the accretion model Gas giant, gas collapse model A terrestrial world is born…

Origins of a solar system

Types of planets

Terrestrial Terrestrial planets like Earth and Mars are rocky planets with metal cores and high densities. They are smaller than gas giants and have slower rotation periods. In addition, their smaller size means they are less likely to have moons. Gas giant At a further distance from their orbiting star, gas giants are able to accrete more matter in their formation, giving them a large size and mass. For example, Jupiter is 11 times larger than Earth, and has a volume 1,300 times greater Dwarf planet Smaller than a true planet, the difference between an asteroid and a dwarf planet comes down to its shape. To be a dwarf planet, a body must have sufficient mass to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium, when it will become spherical.…

Types of planets

Planet formation in action

Our nearest star-forming region is the Orion Nebula, a massive cloud of gas and dust around 1,500 light years away. The striking nebula is visible to the naked eye – and positively breathtaking as seen through the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s sharp images, like this one from 2009, have revealed 42 protoplanetary discs (proplyds) where planet formation is now in progress. Theta1 Orionis C, the nebula’s brightest star, heats nearby proplyds, giving them a bright glow. Proplyds forming further away are too dim to see, but their dark dust blocks out parts of the bright nebula in the background, creating silhouettes astronomers can study. “The origins of Jovian gas giant planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, are less certain”…

Planet formation in action

Discovering a protoplanet

In January, the University of Chile published images showing a protoplanetary disc in action around HD 142527, a young star over 450 light years away. Can you describe the data shown in the image? This is a protoplanetary system seen face-on. In red is the thermal emission from rocks or tiny pebbles or sand grains. The size of these particles is about one millimetre. The rest of the colours are gaseous. In green, we see the Formyl ion molecule and in blue we have carbon monoxide. In a lighter blue, there are two filaments crossing the cavity that converge on the centre where the star would be. Those filaments are faint compared to the rest of the nebula, but they are there. This is the first time we’ve seen such…

Discovering a protoplanet

Creating a GALAXY

The universe is packed with galaxies. Everywhere we look and at almost every point in history we see galaxies crammed into the cosmos, grouped in clusters and great sheets that criss-cross through space-time. The most distant galaxies ever seen have been identified by the Hubble Space Telescope as being 13.2 billion light years away. Yet these are not even the most distant galactic structures out there. It’s the first galaxies that hold the record for being the furthest away from us. However, we’re yet to see them. To do so we will need the infrared prowess of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will be able to see galaxies as they are forming just 300 or 400 million years after the Big Bang – the event that threw the…

Creating a GALAXY

100 wonders of space

1 Saturn’s Rings The rings of Saturn are extraordinary. First observed by Galileo Galilei in 1610, these structures are incredibly thin, measuring just one kilometre (0.62 miles) from top to bottom. They’re made up of billions of particles of ice and rock, some as large as mountains and others too small to be seen with the naked eye. It’s not known for sure how old the rings are, or exactly how they formed, but it is thought possible that the fragments are pieces of shattered moons, smashed to bits by collisions in the not too distant past. 2 Andromeda Currently sitting at just over 2 million light years from Earth, our closest spiral galaxy Andromeda, and its 100 million stars, are rapidly getting closer. They are rushing towards us at…

100 wonders of space

EDGE of the UNIVERSE

In December 1995 astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope began a remarkable experiment. Turning the telescope’s powerful gaze on an apparently empty patch of sky in the constellation Ursa Major, they let its cameras soak up rare photons of light for more than 100 hours. The resulting image revealed countless galaxies disappearing into the darkness – it would prove to be the first of several Hubble Deep Field images. These awe-inspiring pictures have revealed the remote universe in everincreasing detail. From our location on Earth, the entire cosmos is an enormous time machine – light might be the fastest thing there is, but even its tremendous top speed of 300,000 kilometres (186,400 miles) per second dwindles in comparison with the vast distances of remote stars and galaxies. Everywhere we look…

EDGE of the UNIVERSE

Towards the edge

“Even the brightest galaxies we can observe, less than a billion years from the Big Bang, are very faint” Professor Steve Finkelstein, University of Texas…

Towards the edge

Beyond the edge

“Thanks to an automated alert system, Tanvir’s team were able to start observing the burst within 25 minutes”…

Beyond the edge

10 BIGGEST THINGS IN SPACE

The biggest thing in space that we're sure of is the biggest thing we can see, which is the cosmic web of the observable universe, the three-dimensional scaffold of galactic structures that makes up what our best instruments are able to observe. A more precise estimate of just how big this is was recently returned by the ongoing Planck space mission, which aims to provide a complete map of the sky. By mapping the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow left over from the Big Bang, scientists have determined that the furthest objects we can observe from Earth are around 13.8 billion light years away. So how far beyond that does the universe extend? The truth becomes muddied when you approach the boundary of what we can see and talk about…

10 BIGGEST THINGS IN SPACE

The new search for ALIEN LIFE

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has always been a fringe science. Since it began in the mid-20th century, scientists involved in the field have had to fight for scraps of funding, often to ridicule from the public and media alike for what many consider a fruitless task. But now, thanks to a Russian billionaire, SETI is no longer going to be an also-ran – it is about to join the upper echelons of astronomy and, if a positive detection is made, those scientists once on the fringe could find themselves propelled into a whole new limelight. In July, it was revealed that investor Yuri Milner, who has Facebook, Twitter and Alibaba on his portfolio, would be funding a $100 million (£65 million) project known as Breakthrough Listen. It…

The new search for ALIEN LIFE

What happens if we make contact?

What’s the procedure if we find alien life? In the case of SETI, there is a set of protocols. I was the chair of an international committee that revised these protocols over the last five to ten years, and basically you have ample time to check out the signal, tell everybody, and don’t respond without international agreement. That’s basically all there is to it. But the truth is, it doesn’t really work that way. And we know that because, in the case of false alarms, you see what really happens. There’s no policy of secrecy within SETI. If you get a signal, and it looks interesting and you begin to think it might be the real thing, you start to call people at other observatories and say ‘hey, would you…

What happens if we make contact?

HUBBLE’S GREATEST DISCOVERIES

INTERVIEW BIO Dr Mario Livio Senior astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute Dr Mario Livio is an astrophysicist specialising in exciting stuff like black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs and supernova explosions. He has worked with Hubble at the Space Telescope Science Institute since 1991 and has published over 400 scientific papers and five popular science books. This year, the Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 25th year in space. Over the past two and a half decades, it has made more than a million observations, provided the data for over 10,000 scientific publications and it has given us a breathtaking window out into the far reaches of the universe from its position beyond the haze of our atmosphere. Hubble was the brainchild of American astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer…

HUBBLE’S GREATEST DISCOVERIES

“I am certainly proud to have been a part of this fantastic scientific endeavour”

How did you get involved with Hubble? Shortly after its launch in 1990, I was contacted by a colleague that was already at the Space Telescope Science Institute (the institute that conducts the scientific program of Hubble) and he asked me whether I would consider coming to work at the Institute. I had visited it already in 1986 and hence was somewhat familiar with the organisation and I knew quite a few of the astronomers there. So after a brief hesitation, I said I would definitely consider it. Hubble got off to a shaky start: what was the feeling at the Space Telescope Science Institute when the flaw was discovered? I was not yet at the Institute when the spherical aberration of the mirror was discovered, but I was absolutely…

“I am certainly proud to have been a part of this fantastic scientific endeavour”

What is dark energy?

It seeps through every pore of the universe; an energy that permeates through anything and everything that stands in its way. Yet while it seems to be everywhere, this ‘dark energy’ almost behaves like some mythical beast that even our best equipment fails to catch. This mystery force seems to be pushing the galaxies that pepper the cosmos further and further apart, driving the very expansion of time and space from the moment everything that we know popped into existence. Importantly, it is causing this expansion to accelerate, with the universe expanding at an ever faster rate rather than a decreasing rate, which is counter-intuitive given the fact that the Big Bang was 13.8 billion years ago. Dark energy could even decide the fate of the universe; if it keeps…

What is dark energy?

The supernova snapper

How can DECam pick up light from distant supernovae and turn this data into information about dark energy? A Type Ia supernova is the total annihilation of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, turning all the mass into light. Since we know how much mass is roughly present, we can predict how bright it should be. This means we can use them as ‘standardisable candles’, which means we can manipulate them so they all have the same brightness at the peak of their explosion. Once we know their peak brightness, we can estimate their distance, which in turn allows us to determine how distance has changed with time. Astronomers have about 1,000 Type Ia supernovae they can use to measure distances in the universe, but it is time to collect more…

The supernova snapper

Microwave listener

Where do the baryon acoustic oscillations, or BAOs, come from? They come from the very early stages of the universe, when it was dominated by radiation. In general gravity tends to amplify small primordial density or energy perturbations: the more matter or energy, the stronger the gravitational force. Gravitational attraction is the basic mechanism behind the growth of structures in the universe (such as galaxies or stars). But at that early time radiation pressure opposed gravity and this generates oscillations very similar to sound waves or waves in the sea. What aspects of dark energy can the BAOs tell us about? In particular we want to measure what is the density of dark energy and how it evolves with time. This could shed new light over the nature of dark…

Microwave listener

We speak to Dr Kathy Romer of the University of Sussex to find out how she uses galaxies to probe dark energy

How important is the Dark Energy Survey to scientists’ efforts to understand dark energy? The Dark Energy Survey will use the DECam instrument to locate millions of galaxies across a large fraction of the southern sky. It will also locate thousands of exploding stars, known as supernovae. The galaxies and supernovae can be used as beacons to trace the size, shape and history of the universe. These are all properties that are modified by dark energy. Therefore, by comparing observations with theoretical predictions, we can get closer to knowing which theory of dark energy is correct. The starlight from the galaxies we observe with DECam is up to 10 billion years old (the further away the galaxy, the older the light), so this experiment is a lot like an archaeological…

We speak to Dr Kathy Romer of the University of Sussex to find out how she uses galaxies to probe dark energy

50 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT BLACK HOLES

“As stars age, the fuel eventually starts to run out” 1 Many black holes started life as stars Stars spend their entire lifetimes resisting gravitational collapse. Their enormous mass means that the gas is continually pulled towards the core, but instead of collapsing down, atoms collide and fuse, releasing explosive atomic energy. Radiation pushes outwards against gravity, holding the star open as a glowing ball of gas. As stars age, more and more of the atoms are fused, creating heavier and heavier elements, and eventually the fuel starts to run out. Without the outwards push, the balance is tipped in favour of gravity, and the star begins to collapse. For small stars, such as the Sun, the collapse is incomplete, and repelling forces manage to hold the last glowing embers…

50 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT BLACK HOLES

How do planetary orbits work?

Kepler's laws of planetary motion If the Sun disappeared tomorrow, Earth would soon become a very cold and dark planet and would tumble out of its orbit. It would follow a straight rather than a curved path, drifting away in whichever direction it was facing. Thankfully, this won’t happen any time soon. Even though the Earth only wants to go forward, the Sun's gravity stops it moving further away and holds it in orbit, doing the same for the Solar System's other planets, dwarf planets, comets and asteroids. In doing so, the Sun exerts a centripetal force, pulling these falling bodies into an elliptical path around it. The stable orbits that result are a balancing act between the planet's forward motion and the gravitational pull exerted on it. At the…

How do planetary orbits work?

When you look up at the night sky, you’ll see millions upon millions of illuminated objects, from the Moon and stars to the planets in our Solar System. It is easy to think that they make up the bulk of what exists in the universe but, in fact, what can be viewed is a tiny fraction of what is there. What you can’t see is an invisible yet important entity called dark matter, which makes up 22 per cent of the cosmos. That may strike you as odd since there is six times more dark matter than the normal matter that comprises everything we can see and touch, but as one of astronomy’s deepest mysteries, it looks set to take decades to unravel its secrets. Dark matter has been confounding…

Dark matter vs dark energy

Big Freeze Rather than rip apart, there is a theory that the universe will continue to expand and then simply stop. Dark energy will push the universe apart, with the energy inside it becoming more and more spread out, until it reaches a balance point with dark matter. New stars will be unable to form because the supplies of gas are too thin and there will be a uniform temperature. It will result in the Big Freeze, leaving the universe dead and empty. Big Crunch For the ‘Big Crunch’ to occur, gravity would slow expansion and drag objects back, collapsing the universe in on itself. There would need to be enough matter with a density greater than critical density to exert the required gravitational force. It would also mean dark…

Dark matter vs dark energy

Making a dark matter map

Hot, warm and cold dark matter Cold dark matter The cold dark matter theory is favoured by most astronomers. It posits that cold dark matter particles move much more slowly than the speed of light. This means they possess lower energies and have an increased chance of growing hierarchically since they can attract and merge with each other, forming largescale structures. Warm dark matter Warm dark matter sits between cold and hot matter. Structures are formed from the bottom-up, as with cold dark matter where the distribution can grow denser and more massive. They also form from the top-down, in the manner of hot dark matter. Warm dark matter particles move at a higher speed than cold dark matter but slower than hot. Hot dark matter Possessing high energy and…

Making a dark matter map

Imagine a galaxy so large that, if it took the place of the Milky Way, it would not only engulf our galaxy’s immediate satellites like the Magellanic Clouds, but also swallow up the giant Andromeda spiral 2.5 million light years away. The idea of a monster on this scale might seem outlandish, but in fact there’s just such a giant 1 billion light years from Earth, in the constellation of Virgo. IC 1101 is the elliptical super galaxy at the heart of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster – a huge ball of red and yellow stars with an incredible six million-light year diameter. Giant ellipticals, sometimes nicknamed super galaxies, are the biggest and most massive galaxies in the universe, as Ryan Hickox, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and…

Formation of a giant galaxy

1. Gas-rich discs The light from disc galaxies is dominated by young, bright and short-lived stars that are continuously created in disc regions filled with star-forming gas and dust, and older red and yellow stars in a comparatively gas-poor hub. 2. In collision When galaxies collide, direct hits between stars are rare, but tidal forces disrupt the spiral arms and cause them to unwind. Clouds of gas, however, undergo headon collisions that can heat them up and drive gas out into the galaxy’s halo. 3. Birth of an elliptical Stripped of the cool gas that can help to form new stars, the galaxy now consists of older, long-lived stars that are left in chaotic orbits around the nucleus, which contains a large supermassive black hole. 4. Continued growth The newly…

Formation of a giant galaxy

Probing the secrets of galactic growth

Why is it important to study the brightest galaxies at the centres of galaxy clusters? What’s interesting about studying the brightest cluster galaxies is that we can see the normal processes that occur at the centres of all elliptical galaxies in great detail, because everything is amped up – we see these powerful jets coming out of supermassive black holes. The black holes are bigger, the jets are more powerful, and the mass of gas surrounding them is larger, so given the instrumentation we have, we can study this process we call feedback in tremendous detail. Can you explain what the feedback process involves? The notion of feedback is pretty simple – in the late-Nineties we discovered there’s a remarkable relationship between a galaxy’s total mass and that of its…

Probing the secrets of galactic growth

HOW STARS EXPLODE

Look down at your hands. It is likely that you can make out the intricate network of vessels carrying blood around your body. It is also possible that you are wearing some form of jewellery, a ring, bracelet or watch made from gold, silver or platinum perhaps. What do these things have in common? The unlikely answer is that without exploding stars – supernovae - none of them would exist on Earth. Those precious metals, along with the iron ferrying oxygen around inside you, were all forged during the death throes of a very big star. Compared with us mere humans, stars live incredibly long lives. Even those that die youngest manage to eke out an existence that can last for hundreds of millions of years. For most of its…

HOW STARS EXPLODE

Supernova danger zone

Planet sizes not to scale…

Supernova danger zone

Staring into the heart of supernova explosions

What are the scientific goals of ASTRO-H? ASTRO-H will measure dynamical processes taking place in wide categories of objects for the first time, using a combination of micro-calorimeters, X-ray CCDs and other two instruments that cover hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray bands. So it will open up high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy. The mission will determine the velocity of the gas in clusters of galaxies and allow sensitive and precise measurements of how clusters grow and evolve. Measuring the chemical composition of the gas in active galaxies should allow measurements of the strength of the winds in these sources, which are predicted to be one of the main players in the formation of galaxies. Measurements of the gas in supernova remnants and clusters will also provide precise determination of how relativistic particles…

Staring into the heart of supernova explosions

5 stars due to explode

Betelgeuse Type of star: Red supergiant When star will explode: next few hundred thousand years Size: 1,000 times larger than the Sun Distance: 643 light years Mass: 7.7 – 20 solar masses Antares Type of star: Red supergiant When star will explode: next few hundred thousand years Size: 883 times larger than the Sun Distance: 550 light years Mass: 12.4 solar masses Mu Cephei Type of star: Red supergiant When star will explode: next few million years Size: Around 1,000 times larger than the Sun Distance: 6,000 light years Mass: 19.2 solar masses Rigel Type of star: Blue supergiant When star will explode: next few million years Size: 79 times larger than the Sun Distance: 860 light years Mass: 21 solar masses Eta Carinae Type of star: Binary star system…

5 stars due to explode

The search for wormholes

Wormholes are so-called gateways that provide a shortcut through the fabric of space-time. They can be thought of as tunnels with ends capped by an ever-hungry black and a white hole, the black hole’s time-reversed cousin that prefers to spit things out if anything comes too close to its event horizon. It’s true that a wormhole never looks out of place in science fiction, for example lurking in the universe of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and employed by captain Benjamin Sisko and his crew of the Defiant. They use the hole to travel from the Alpha to the Gamma quadrant on the other side of the galaxy at unprecedented speed – certainly a thrilling prospect. However, we still don't know for sure whether traversable wormholes like the ones in…

The search for wormholes

Why are we looking for wormholes?

“I think it's extremely important that we continue to search for and research the ideas behind wormholes. There are all sorts of [avenues for] research and we often find that some subjects are more practical than others. Obviously wormhole physics is not a very practical subject but wormholes and other exotic phenomena, provide a route to understanding some of the deepest questions about the nature of our universe – the arena of our very existence. For that reason alone, this is an exciting endeavour and deserving of support for its own sake. "It’s also important to note subjects that might seem highly impractical could eventually be central to our daily lives. Electromagnetic theory was at one time considered an impractical subject and now it's fundamental to everyday life. Quantum theory…

Why are we looking for wormholes?

Are wormholes likely to exist?

Yes Dr Eric Davis, senior research physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies “Yes, wormholes should exist in nature, because they are predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is the theory that also predicted black holes, cosmology, neutron stars, the gravitational lensing of galaxies, gravitational redshift and time dilation, the bending of light by stars (gravitational lensing) among other things. “All of these astrophysical phenomena have been repeatedly observed to high precision and so verify the general relativity theory. There is no reason why wormholes shouldn't exist based on a very well-tested theory whose other predictions have been verified as previously mentioned. Another prediction of general relativity is the existence of gravitational waves [which could form an indication of the existence of wormholes], and there has been a…

Are wormholes likely to exist?

The story of the wormhole

Building bridges In 1935 Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen were the first scientists to come up with the idea of wormholes. They described how their theory presents a description of space by means of two sheet, while a spatially finite bridge connects these sheets. Technically they are known as Einstein-Rosen Bridges, but the American physicist John Wheeler introduced the term wormholes for them in 1957. Clocks run slower Kip Thorne theorised that wormholes can act as time machines. Imagine you have a wormhole and you take one mouth of it and accelerate it close to the speed of light, before bringing it back. According to special relativity, time runs slower for things moving near the speed of light, so a clock inside the accelerated mouth would show an entirely different…

The story of the wormhole

Turning a wormhole into a time machine

Take a piece of paper and imagine that it's a two-dimensional representation of our universe. Sprinkled across this paper are all the stars and galaxies. To travel from one end to the other would take a long time, so imagine if it were possible to take a shortcut that folds space. If you bend the paper so that the two opposite ends are now touching, rather than crossing the entire length of the paper to get to the other end, you can just hop a short distance to reach it. The idea is that a wormhole would act like a bridge to connect the two ends together. Now imagine that the paper doesn’t just represent space, but also time. This means that a wormhole doesn’t just connect two different spaces…

Turning a wormhole into a time machine

Hypergiant stars

Look up at the sky on a dark night, and you’ll see hundreds of stars. But only a few will really stand out – have you ever wondered why? For some, it’s simply because they’re quite close to Earth. For instance, Sirius is just 8.6 light years away – so, even though it’s a fairly average star (though still 25 times more luminous than our Sun) it appears as the brightest star in our sky. But other stars appear bright because they really are. The second brightest star in the sky, Canopus, is one such star – 310 light years from Earth and some 15,000 times more luminous than the Sun. Stars in this class are usually known as supergiants – they have the mass of ten or more Suns,…

Hypergiant stars

The size of stars

“Supergiants simply don’t live long enough to make it out of their stellar nurseries”…

The size of stars

Types of giant stars

Red supergiant The biggest red giants are the largest stars in the universe, swollen to diameters of a billion kilometres or more by changes in their cores as they near the end of their lives. As they swell in size and brighten to hundreds of thousands of times solar luminosity, their surfaces cool to a distinctive red colour. But many scientists say these stars are supergiants rather than true hypergiants. Yellow supergiant Yellow supergiants seem to be a rare intermediate stage, though again they get their name from their size and brightness rather than their mass. They seem to be red supergiants that have shed large amounts of their outer gas as they head towards a supernova explosion. In this photo of the ‘Fried Egg Nebula’, rings of ejected material…

Types of giant stars

Star classification

One of the most useful tools for classifying stars is the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. It plots stars according to their surface temperature and colour or ‘spectral type’ (on the horizontal axis) and their luminosity (on the vertical axis). When a large number of randomly selected stars are plotted, a pattern soon emerges: most stars are arranged along a diagonal ribbon known as the ‘main sequence’, that runs between the faint, cool and red and the bright, hot and blue. Luminous cool stars and faint hot ones (‘red giants’ and ‘white dwarfs’) occupy regions to either side of the main sequence and are comparatively rare.…

Star classification

Hypergiants in our galaxy

Eta Carinae Constellation: Carina Distance from Earth: 7,500-8,000 light years Pistol Star Constellation: Sagittarius Distance from Earth: 25,000 light years Thor’s Helmet Constellation: Canis Major Distance from Earth: 15,000 light years…

Hypergiants in our galaxy

Searching for monster stars

Can we start by asking what first drew your attention to the R136 star cluster? Well, it’s probably the prime target for anyone looking for the most massive stars – it’s the most obvious place to look really because it’s the most massive young star cluster in our part of the universe. It’s about the same size as the famous Orion Nebula, but while that’s got a couple of thousand stars, R136 probably contains 100,000 stars or more, if you could see them all. It’s been known about for a long time, but the exciting thing is that now, with Hubble and large ground-based telescopes, we can resolve separate stars and look at them individually. As I understand it, there’s a really tight knot of stars at the cluster’s centre,…

Searching for monster stars

GIANT SPACE STORMS

As we fight against the high winds, lashing rain and deafening thunderstorms on our planet, it’s quite easy to think that there’s nothing worse than the dreadful weather that can batter Earth’s landscape. That is, until you leave the envelope of our atmosphere that serves as a gateway to space. Here, even a windproof umbrella and a faithful waterproof windcheater jacket that served you so well on Earth won’t save you. That’s because the weather that can be found in space is monstrous, making our planet’s occasional crashes of thunder sound like low grumbles and the great lashes of rain, capable of flooding the lowlands, appear as nothing more than puddles made by light drizzle. No more than an astronomical stone’s throw away – at an average distance of 108…

GIANT SPACE STORMS

The Solar System’s weather

The Sun Extremely hot, with angry outbursts of coronal mass ejection – a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields. High temperatures will persist for the foreseeable future with the possibility of solar flares. Average temperature 5,500°C (9,932°F) Venus A very cloudy start with acid rain only affecting the planet’s highlands. There are likely to be strong winds, hitting speeds up to 360 kilometres (224 miles) per hour. High temperatures guaranteed. Average temperature 462°C (864°F) Mars Generally cold, dry and clear all day. A change in temperature could see dust devils and dust storms become prevalent in the evening. Very cold during the night, with sub -60°C (-76°F) temperatures. Average temperature -55°C (-67°F) Jupiter Very strong persistent winds of around 360 kilometres (224 miles) per hour in most places…

The Solar System’s weather

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