Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Heidi Jo Newberg, Ph.D., professor of astronomy; Tom Donlon, Ph.D., a visiting researcher at Rensselaer and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alabama; and their team have recently published research that reveals a shocking discovery about the history of our universe: the Milky Way Galaxy’s last major collision occurred billions of years later than previously thought.
Are there other Earth-like planets? Is there extraterrestrial life? In the quest to find planets that orbit stars other than the sun, “Earth 2.0” is the Holy Grail. Earth 2.0 is a planet similar enough to Earth to enable the existence of life as we know it. It would be the right temperature for liquid water, and it would orbit a star with a steady supply of light. Ideally, it would be close enough that we could imagine going there or at least sending a probe to explore it.
Astrophysicists for the first time have calculated the original mass and size of a dwarf galaxy that was shredded in a collision with the Milky Way billions of years ago.
Inspired by a concept for discovering exoplanets with a giant space telescope, a team of researchers is developing holographic lenses that render visible and infrared starlight into either a focused image or a spectrum.
Astrophysicists announced today that announced that the merger of a dwarf galaxy and the Milky Way produced a series of telltale shell-like formations of stars in the vicinity of the Virgo constellation, the first such “shell structures” to be found in the Milky Way.
The Milky Way galaxy is at least 50 percent larger than is commonly estimated, according to new findings that reveal that the galactic disk is contoured into several concentric ripples.
Troy, N.Y. – As a founding member of the Supernova Cosmology Project, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Heidi Newberg will share the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with members of two competing teams that discovered Dark Energy.
A simulation developed with MilkyWay@Home shows the formation of several stellar streams (Sagittarius, Orphan, and GD-1) around the Milky Way. The animation represents four billion years in the Milky Way, ending at the present day.