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.
NASA’s Kepler Mission K2 team announced the discovery of another new world today, two months after the Kepler spacecraft ran out of fuel on Oct. 30th, and ended its mission after nine years, during which it discovered 2,600 confirmed planets around other stars – the bulk of those now known – along with thousands of additional candidates astronomers are working to confirm.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the days’ headlines on the science, discoveries, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
