Content about “astronomy”

News story

What made the Moon?

New research suggests that our trusty companion may not have been the Earth's first, but formed from several smaller moonlets.
News story

Political tides

Politician Douglas Carswell has been arguing with scientists about what causes the tides. We've figured out who's right.
News story

Dark energy say cheese!

Images are now being taken on the world's most powerful digital camera. For over 500 nights over the next five years the Dark Energy Camera will photograph the light from more than 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each image.
Article

Bang, crunch, freeze and the multiverse

Some of the things I overheard at Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday conference did make me wonder whether I hadn't got the wrong building and stumbled in on a sci-fi convention. "The state of the multiverse". "The Universe is simple but strange". "The future for intelligent life is potentially infinite". And — excuse me — "the Big Bang was just the decay of our parent vacuum"?!
Article
sun

Magnetic tangles

What happens when magnetic fields get tangled up in knots? This does happen in the Sun's atmosphere and mathematical models predict that once the magnetic field becomes tangled, it must retain some vestige of this complexity for a long time. This enables the storage of vast quantities of energy. In this article I will outline how the notion of magnetic topology helps us to understand the physical situation and draw such conclusions.

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