China’s new sci-fi feature film The Wandering Earth -adapted from a novella of the same name by Liu Cixin, author of the Hugo Award-winning The Three-Body Problem– opens with a crisis of unprecedented proportions: the sun has become unstable, and within a hundred years, it will expand to consume Earth.
Is it a monster black hole of epic size or a first-of-its-kind supernova? A brief and unusual flash spotted in the night sky on June 16, 2018, has baffled astronomers and astrophysicists around the world. The event – called AT2018cow and nicknamed “the Cow” after the coincidental final letters in its official name – is unlike any celestial outburst ever seen before, prompting multiple theories about its source. “We saw features in the Cow that we have never seen before in a transient, or rapidly changing, object,” said Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University.
The Big Bang didn’t just result in our familiar universe, according to a bold new theory presented by physicist Neil Turok and colleagues at the Perimeter Institute- it also created a second “anti-universe” that extended backwards in time, in a mirror image of our own that could explain the existence of dark matter.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Triangulum Galaxy, a spiral galaxy located at a distance of only three million light-years, inspires the question: “What amazing life forms reside there?” The NASA/ESA Hubble image is the most detailed image yet of a close neighbor of the Milky Way — This panoramic survey of the third-largest galaxy in our Local Group of galaxies shown below provides a mesmerizing view of the 40 billion stars that make up one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye.
