Astrophysics and cosmology Archives – Page 21 of 58

CLOUD shines new light on aerosol formation in atmosphere

The CLOUD experiment at CERN, which is studying whether cosmic rays have a climatically significant effect on aerosols and clouds, is also tackling one of the most challenging and long-standing proble...

Volatile millisecond pulsar validates theory

For the first time, astronomers have caught a pulsar in a crucial transitional phase that explains the origin of the mysterious millisecond pulsars. The newly found pulsar swings back and forth betwee...

ICRC 2013: from Earth to the Galaxy and beyond

Reporting on this year’s major astroparticle physics conference.

Testing times for relativity

Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is one of the most successfully tested ideas in physics. Based on the statement that the laws of physics are invariant under rotations and boosts – of...

Hyper Suprime-Cam offers new view on universe

A stunning image of the nearby Andromeda galaxy (M31) captured by the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) has demonstrated the instrument's capability of fulfilling the goal to use the ground-b...

Kilonova solves the short GRB puzzle

Follow-up observations of a recent short-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) provide the strongest evidence yet that these elusive bursts result from the merger of two neutron stars. The evidence is in the...

AMS-02 provides a precise measure of cosmic rays

Results from the first two years of operation of the AMS experiment on the ISS were presented at ICRC 2013 in Rio de Janeiro.

Do fast radio bursts signal black-hole formation?

Astronomers using the 64-m Parkes radio telescope in Australia have detected radio transients with a duration of only 4 ms. These fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a recently discovered class of myste...

IceCube detects ultra-high-energy events and observes oscillations

Neutrino experiments – thanks to the nature of the particles themselves – are notoriously difficult and experiments that make use of the natural source of particles within the cosmic radiation fac...