News About Our Universe

05/03/2013

Birth of a Black Hole

Marcus Woo

A new kind of cosmic flash may reveal something never seen before: the birth of a black hole.

02/05/2013

Viewing the Cosmos from the South Pole: An Interview with Jamie Bock

Marcus Woo

Almost immediately after the Big Bang—roughly after ten trillionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second—the universe suddenly grew. Very fast.

01/24/2013

Johnson Wins Astronomy Prize

Brian Bell

John A. Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, received the 2012 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), in Long Beach, California.

01/24/2013

Knutson Wins Award

Brian Bell

Heather A. Knutson, an assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech, is the 2012 recipient of the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy.

01/10/2013

A Cloudy Mystery

Marcus Woo

It's the mystery of the curiously dense cloud. And astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are on the case. Near the crowded galactic center, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun—a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second—one particular cloud has baffled astronomers. Indeed, the cloud, dubbed G0.253+0.016, defies the rules of star formation.

01/02/2013

Planets Abound

Marcus Woo

Look up at the night sky and you'll see stars, sure. But you're also seeing planets—billions and billions of them. At least. That's the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm. The team made their estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32—planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority in the galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most planets form.

12/13/2012

A Close Encounter of the First Kind

Douglas Smith

A new era in planetary science began in 1962, when Mariner 2 and the 200-inch Hale telescope simultaneously took a close look at Venus.

12/12/2012

Caltech-Led Astronomers Discover Galaxies Near Cosmic Dawn

Marcus Woo

A team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to discover seven of the most primitive and distant galaxies ever seen. One of the galaxies, the astronomers say, might be the all-time record holder—the galaxy as observed existed when the universe was merely 380 million years old. All of the newly discovered galaxies formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was just about 4 percent of its present age, a period astronomers call the "cosmic dawn," when the first galaxies were born. The universe is now 13.7 billion years old. The new observations span a period between 350 million and 600 million years after the Big Bang and represent the first reliable census of galaxies at such an early time in cosmic history, the team says.

11/27/2012

A Sky Full of Planets

Ann Motrunich

The confirmed count of planets in other solar systems has skyrocketed to more than 850, plus thousands of identified candidates. The opportunity to characterize so many solar systems has brought together Caltech planetary scientists and astronomers, who are forming a Center for Planetary Astronomy.

11/19/2012

One Metal Scoop, Slightly Used

Douglas Smith

On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean paid a visit to JPL's Surveyor 3, which had landed on the moon two and a half years earlier.

11/25/2012

Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand

Douglas Smith

José Andrade has got the dirt on dirt. An associate professor of civil and mechanical engineering at Caltech, Andrade will discuss how the actions of a few grains of sand can affect landslides, earthquakes, and even Mars rovers. He will be speaking at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 28, 2012, in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Admission is free.