Read article: A reference point to the cosmos
It is a tribute to the dynamism of astrophysics today, and to the achievements of the past century, that Paul Murdin and his distinguished editorial board, together with over 500 contributors, many of...
Read article: Uranium reveals the age of the universe
Uranium in a primitive star shows that the universe is at least 12.5 billion years old
Read article: 11 key questions about the universe
US experts identify the hottest topics in particle physics and astronomy
Read article: The Milky Way’s last meal
Wandering stars could be remains of a small galaxy absorbed long ago
The JIF scheme was set up in 1998 by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust – the world’s largest biomedical research charity – to provide much-needed funding for university labora...
Read article: Quintessence
Cosmologists have proposed that a mysterious substance called quintessence can explain why our universe is accelerating. But what is it made of?
Ghez and colleagues collected infrared images of the nucleus of the Milky Way over a four-year period using the 10-metre Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The positions of the stars nearest Sagit...
The expansion of the universe means that the light from distant galaxies is red-shifted when observed on Earth. The larger the red shift, the greater the distance to the galaxy. Moreover, when we view...
Sandage is best known for his efforts to pin down the values of the Hubble constant, the age of the Universe and its deceleration parameter through observations. Peebles is a theoretical cosmologist w...
Read article: Boomerang backs flat universe
The geometry of the universe is Euclidean and space is flat. This has now been confirmed from detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background – the radiation left over from the big bang...
