Universe Today

2 days ago | universetoday.com | Alan Boyle

The $10,000 Schweickart Prize is awarded every June to mark Asteroid Day and draw attention to risks from above — and this year's prize is going to a team of students who are proposing a panel to focus on what could happen when we start tinkering with asteroids. The winning proposal calls for the creation of a Panel on Asteroid Orbit Alteration, which would address the emerging risks posed by unintended asteroid orbit changes.

3 days ago | universetoday.com | Carolyn Collins Petersen

Astronomers have found a new way of accurately mapping the outer gas disk of the Milky Way using the positions of young stars. In the process, they've also discovered that our galaxy's structure is more complex than everyone thought, complete with tufty-looking "flocculent" gas clouds. University of Alabama's Sukanya Chakrabarti and MSU astronomer Peter Craig came up with the process of mapping hydrogen gas in the Milky Way's outer disk by determining distances to very young stars in it.

1 week ago | universetoday.com | Evan Gough

Regular matter is properly called baryonic matter. It's made of baryons, which are mostly protons and neutrons (but not electrons). Baryons make up the matter we interact with in everyday life, including our own bodies. Baryonic matter makes up about 5% of the Universe, while dark matter (27%) and dark energy (68%) make up the rest, according to the standard cosmological model, Lambda CDM. However, some of the Universe's baryonic matter has been missing, or unaccounted for.

1 week ago | universetoday.com | Carolyn Collins Petersen

The early Universe was a busy place some 13 billion years ago. That's when countless young galaxies began to evolve and birthed stars at a prodigious rate. The hearts of those very distant galaxies show turbulent, lumpy disks studded with even thicker clumps of dust and gas that spawned their huge batches of stars. Astronomers want to understand what's driving the clumping, so they've turned to recent surveys of closer galaxies in the "local Universe" that contain similar lumpy regions.

1 week ago | universetoday.com | Matt Williams

Last year, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Proba-3 mission to space. Comprised of two spacecraft, the Coronograph and the Occulter, it is a technology demonstrator designed to test techniques for highly-precise satellite formation flying that will pave the way for future multi-satellite missions. This past March, the two spacecraft performed a first-ever feat by flying in tandem for hours without help from mission controllers.