Universe

The Hubble telescope does not stop providing information about the history of the universe. In one of his latest images, he has obtained the best photo of some of the most distant and oldest galaxies, some 12,000 million light years away, thanks to the fact that the Abell 2744 cluster or 'Pandora cluster' has functioned as a kind of natural telescope gigantic.

A study recently published in the journal Science in which scientists from the CSIC have participated has just found the first evidence of a molecule based on argon, a noble gas, in space. The finding has been documented exactly in the Crab Nebula, in the constellation of Taurus, about 6,500 light years from Earth.

On some occasion, we have all looked up at the sky on a clear country night, and we have wondered how many stars there are in the universe if we already count hundreds of them with the naked eye.

A team of astronomers has detected a millisecond pulsar at a critical stage in its evolution, when it goes from emitting pulses of X-rays to emitting radio waves. Pulsars are magnetized neutron stars, the dead cores of massive stars that exploded as a supernova when they ran out of fuel. They rotate at high speed, emitting pulses of electromagnetic radiation hundreds of times per second, like a lighthouse. And they are classified according to how they generate these emissions. Radio pulsars derive their energy from the rotation of their magnetic field, while X-ray pulsars feed on an accretion disk formed by matter ripped from a companion star.

Thanks to ESA's XMM-Newton space telescope, a team of scientists has discovered that a curious dead star has one of the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, despite the fact that all indications seemed to indicate that its magnetism was unusually weak. The object, known as SGC 0418 + 5729 (or SGR 0418 for short), is a magnetar, that is, a type of neutron star.

The architecture of the universe is a kind of cosmic network made of visible galaxy filaments "mounted" on scaffolds of dark matter.

Although the composition of dark energy remains a mystery, scientists have already started taking short but decisive steps to understand dark matter. In April, Dr. Samuel Ting, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced that the? Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a? The particle detector that has been operating on the International Space Station for two years has counted more than 400,000 positrons, the antimatter of electrons.

The most detailed image of the history of the cosmic background radiation - that is, of the vestiges of the Big Bang - has been obtained thanks to ESA's Planck space telescope and has just been made public. The new map, based on data collected over fifteen and a half months, is a portrait of the first light of the cosmos, which was etched in the sky when it was 380,000 years old. And it completes the concept that astrophysicists of the universe had until now. br>