BiotechMashup

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) Distant galaxy clusters mysteriously stream at a million miles per hour along a path roughly centered on the southern constellations Centaurus and Hydra. A new study led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., tracks this collective motion -- dubbed the "dark flow" -- to twice the distance originally reported.

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took advantage of a giant cosmic magnifying glass to create one of the sharpest and most detailed maps of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is an invisible and unknown substance that makes up the bulk of the universe's mass.

New observations with the Very Long Baseline Array have made the farthest direct distance measurement ever, a key step toward understanding the mysterious Dark Energy that constitutes some 70 percent of the Universe. Other observations are redrawing the map of our home Galaxy and promise to revise our understanding of extrasolar planets.

(Arizona State University) Looking deep into space is like experiencing the universe in a house of mirrors where everything is distorted through a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Astronomers have started to apply this concept in a new way to determine the number of distant galaxies and measure dark matter in the universe. A letter published in Nature Jan. 13 makes the case that the tool may be even more necessary than originally thought when looking at distant galaxies.

Looking deep into space is like experiencing the universe in a house of mirrors where everything is distorted through a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Astronomers have started to apply this concept in a new way to determine the number of distant galaxies and measure dark matter in the universe. A new article makes the case that the tool may be even more necessary than originally thought when looking at distant galaxies.

A new but technically challenging observational "shortcut" will help make large-scale cosmic maps that can yield clues to to the nature of the mysterious "dark energy" that pervades the universe.

An international team of astrophysicists has discovered 10 new massive galaxy clusters from a large, uniform survey of the southern sky. The survey was conducted using a breakthrough technique that detects "shadows" of galaxy clusters on the cosmic microwave background radiation, a relic of the "big bang" that gave birth to the universe.

Dark energy is a mysterious force that pervades all space, acting as a "push" to accelerate the universe's expansion. Despite being 70 percent of the universe, dark energy was only discovered in 1998 by two teams observing Type Ia supernovae. A Type 1a supernova is a cataclysmic explosion of a white dwarf star. The best way of measuring dark energy just got better, thanks to a new study of Type Ia supernovae.