Brandon Q. Morris's Blog

In search of the asymmetry of the universe

If the universe would be symmetrical, there would be neither you nor me nor anything else – except a lot of energy. Because then matter and antimatter, which must have existed at that time (symmetry presupposed) in identical quantity, would have annihilated each other shortly after the big bang. This did not happen. Matter retained the upper hand. So we know that the universe cannot be symmetrical. But why? The physics supplies us to it – still – keone clues. Astrophysicists have therefore been ...

Where do the bubbles outside the Milky Way come from?

Back in 2020, astronomers made a striking discovery in the first complete sky map from the eRosita X-ray telescope aboard the SRG observatory: a huge circular structure of hot gas below the Milky Way plane that occupies most of the southern sky. A similar structure in the northern sky, called the “North Polar Spur,” had been known for some time and was thought to have originated from an early supernova explosion. Taken together, the northern and southern structures instead both appear to emerge ...

Who polluted the globular clusters?

Globular clusters are very dense, spherical collections of stars with a radius of a dozen to a hundred light-years. They can contain up to a million stars and are found in all kinds of galaxies. There are about 180 of them in our galaxy. One of their great mysteries is the composition of the stars they contain. Although they were all born at the same time in the same gas cloud, the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, sodium and aluminum, for example, vary from one star to another.

A team from the U...

More life at the first stars?

The very first stars consisted only of hydrogen and helium – there were no other elements in the still young cosmos. When they died in gigantic explosions, they released what had accumulated in them: heavier elements, which were needed so that planets could form. The more heavy elements (cosmologists call them “metals,” although chemically they aren’t necessarily), the more planets can form, the better chance life has, right? Not quite. Whether life has a chance depends on more than just the com...

A new picture of dark matter

We can’t see it – but by observing its effects, we can still find out where it’s hiding. We’re talking about dark matter. Researchers at the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have now used this principle to create a groundbreaking new image that shows the most detailed map of dark matter to date. It covers a quarter of the entire sky and extends deep into the cosmos. Moreover, it confirms – once again – Einstein’s theory of how massive structures grow and bend light over the universe’s lifetime ...

The flattest explosion

An explosion the size of our solar system has stunned scientists because its shape – similar to an extremely flat disk – challenges everything we know about explosions in space. The observed explosion was a bright Fast Blue Optical Transient (FBOT) – an extremely rare type of explosion, much rarer than, say, supernovae. The first bright FBOT was discovered in 2018 and was nicknamed “the cow.”

Explosions of stars in the universe are almost always spherical, because the stars themselves are spheri...

85,000 volcanoes on Venus

You are planning a trip to Venus? Then you’d better avoid the numerous volcanoes there. This works better with good map material, as it is now finally available: Planetologists Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn from Washington University have counted 85,000 volcanoes on our neighboring planet Venus – and entered them on a map for the first time. The accompanying database is publicly available.

“This work is the most comprehensive map of all volcanic structures on Venus ever produced,” says Byrne, asso...

Why ‘Oumuamua accelerated

Comet (?) ‘Oumuamua is the first known object formed outside the solar system that astronomers could observe on its way through our solar system. Its nature is still not conclusively explained – at least for some researchers. What we do know: It has not shown any radiation. Measurements in this regard are so accurate that even a cell phone transmitting on the object would have been noticed.

But ‘Oumuamua also shows a small non-gravitational acceleration. So it didn’t move exactly as would have b...

The Way of the Water

The water that fills the earth’s oceans, lakes and rivers has come a long way. It is initially formed in molecular clouds, which consist of 90 percent molecular hydrogen. When individual regions in these clouds condense into stars, it plays an important role in the formation of the protoplanetary disk. In the process, it is often transported as ice to their outer regions, from where it is later carried by comets to the inner planets. Cosmologists have already been able to document the first and ...

Life on Mars? We will not find it this way

The scientific instruments currently being used on Mars may not be sensitive enough to detect possible traces of life in this environment. Researchers explain this in a paper published in Nature Communications.

Since the Viking missions in the 1970s, there have been several attempts to search for signs of life on Mars. Now, half a century later, even the latest sophisticated instruments on NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have detected only small amounts of simple organic molecules. Why ...