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A new research study has claimed to have found evidence for another merger happening in the Milky Way’s history, 12.3 billion years ago, when the Universe was just 2 billion years old. They’ve dubbed the galaxy that merged with the Milky Way back then the Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles system, or LKH for short. And one of the reasons this is so interesting of a finding is that simulations trying to recreate the Milky Way’s current shape and properties often predict a merger happening at this time fo

What is galactic archeology? Because At its heart, it's figuring out the Milky Way’s history by treating the stars as fossils. The shape of a galaxy can tell you a lot about how its evolved over time and what’s happened in its history. These impacts and interactions triggered big bursts of newly formed stars in the Milky Way, which fun fact: one of which we think might have formed the Sun and the solar system 4.5 billion years ago... #milkyway #astrotok #astrophysics #collision #galaxy

If you want to detect the ripples from supermassive black hole mergers, then you need an an observatory bigger than the Earth to do this! Which is a huge engineering challenge. But ESA aren’t one to back away from a challenge. So they’re now working towards LISA, the laser interferometer space antenna. Three spacecraft in a triangle separated by 2.5 million kilometres, all trailing the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The technique that LISA will use does differ slightly from ground based dete

Who waited the longest to win a Noble Prize in Physics? 🥉Winning the bronze medal, in third place is Yoichiro Nambu, who waited 48 years before winning his Nobel Prize in 2008 "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" - an idea he first published in 1960. 🥈Winning the silver medal in second place, is Peter Higgs, who waited 49 years before winning his Nobel Prize in 2013, for his prediction of the existence of the Higgs field and Higgs boson. 🥇Winni

I think this time of year is one of my favourite times of year for stargazing. The nights are getting longer, but are still fairly mild at the end of summer so you don’t get too cold. And you’ve still got a fairly good view of the denser part of the Milky Way up here in the northern hemisphere. Plus if I’m awake early enough I love catching my first glimpse of Orion returning to our skies in the early morning just before dawn. Speaking of being up early, Jupiter is also coming back into our earl

LISA is an observatory so big that it can’t be built on Earth! Why? Well it’s been 11 years since we detected the very first gravitational wave signal caused by two black holes merging 1.4 billion light years away, that detectors here on Earth managed to pick up on 14th September 2015. Since then we’ve detected almost 400 gravitational wave signals from merging black holes somewhere out there in the Universe. Now the European Space Agency are currently building LISA, the next generation of gravi

In the 1920s it was Edwin Hubble that first noticed that galaxies further away from us, appear to be moving away from us faster than those close by. That was eventually interpreted as the Universe is expanding and led to the development of the Big Bang theory for how the Universe has evolved. But then in 1998 Riess and collaborators published what would become their Nobel prize winning study, which showed as they looked at galaxies with even faster apparent speeds away from us, the galaxies were

What's next for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope now that it has launched? It took off yesterday from Cape Canaveral in Florida on board a Space X Falcon Heavy Rocket, launching roughly 9 months ahead of schedule. So what will happen now? Well, the Roman telescope is heading to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, about 1 million miles from Earth. Orbiting at this point means that it will have a view of most of the Universe and Earth won’t block much of its view. From there, there will be about 3 m

Good news about the end of the Universe! It doesn't look like the Big Freeze is the most likely option for how the Universe will end anymore. Will we get reeled back down into a Big Crunch instead? Essentially the opposite of the Big Bang. The "inevitable heat death of the Universe" might not be so inevitable anymore... #cosmology #astrotok #astrophysics #endoftheworld #lotr 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an un

An astrophysicist’s live reaction to the brand new JWST images #jameswebbtelescope #jwst #nasa #esa #unfoldtheuniverse #space #astronomy #science #sciencetok #spacetok #astrotok

Can’t wait to share this with you all. Link in bio to pre-order! #astronomy #blackholes #astrophysics #science #space #physics #books #youtuber #booktok #sciencebook #scitok #astrotok #eventhorizon

Telescope application season: every astrophysicist’s favourite time of year… NOT! HST is 8 times oversubscribed so it’s very competitive! #astrophysics #astronomy #space #hubble #hubbletelescope #jameswebb #jwst #hst #hubblespacetelescope #NASA #ESA #womeninstem #womeninscience #femalescientist #cosmos #sciencetok