new colony 2030

  The dark matter in the oldest known galaxies in the universe has been mapped. In the new map created by scientists, 1.5 million galaxies are seen as they were 12 billion years ago.   Scientists have mapped dark matter around the oldest, most distant galaxies ever recorded.     One and a half million galaxies are seen as they are, 12 billion years ago, or less than 2 billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies distort the cosmic microwave background—light emitted from an earlier era of the Universe—as seen from Earth. This visual distortion, called 'gravitational lensing', reveals the distribution of dark matter around these galaxies, as scientists report Aug. 5 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

  Using the 8.1-metre Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers were able to take the clearest picture of R136a1, the largest known star in the universe. This discovery, led by Venu M. Kalari, is also important in terms of revealing that big stars are not as big as thought. How massive stars with masses at least 100 times that of the Sun arose is still a mystery to astronomers.   Previous observations have shown that the mass of R136a1 is 250-300 times that of the Sun, but the latest discovery suggests that the number may be 170-230. Even with estimates falling, R136a1 still remains the largest known star on record.