BAD HOMBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 13, 2023--

Scientists have been peering into the depths of space, looking right back at the early days of the universe, and they’ve found something very interesting indeed. Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have come across a discovery that indicates some of the very earliest stars to ever form in the universe were staggering in scale, measuring 10,000 times bigger than the Sun. "Today, thanks to the data collected by the James-Webb Space Telescope, we believe we have found a first clue of the presence of these extraordinary stars," says astrophysicist Corinne Charbonnel of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, in research published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. These features are huge collections of between 100,000 and 1 million stars known as globular clusters, which all feature similar properties. Scientists estimate that they were all formed at the same time. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter They’re remnants of the ancient universe and have been described by researchers as "fossils". The cores of these stars are much hotter than those we see in stars today, and scientists suggest it could be down to an excess of hydrogen burning at high temperatures. It’s thought that smaller stars collided with the supermassive stars and relished their energy. However, now most of these global clusters are approaching the very end of their life spans. "Globular clusters are between 10 and 13 billion years old, whereas the maximum lifespan of superstars is two million years," said Mark Gieles, previously at the University of Surrey but now at the University of Barcelona, back in 2018. "They therefore disappeared very early from the clusters that are currently observable. Only indirect traces remain." The researcher states: "If the supermassive star scenario can be firmed up by future studies, this would provide an important step for our understanding of globular clusters and for the formation of supermassive stars in general, with numerous important implications.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

(Reuters) -Luxury electric-vehicle maker Lucid Group on Thursday launched a cheaper, rear-wheel drive version of the Air Pure sedan starting

Gemini Trust Co., the digital-asset exchange founded by the billionaire Winklevoss brothers, filed a lawsuit against Digital Currency

By Daina Beth Solomon MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Final permits for Tesla to build an electric-vehicle (EV) factory in the northern

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in 2021. After thoroughly reassessing the 8K landscape

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 22, 2023--

European countries are among the least prepared in the world for more hot days in a 2C warmer

An Indigenous community in Indonesia has requested an internet blackout in their area to minimise the "negative impact" of the...

'Star Wars Outlaws' Creative Director Julian Gerighty insists the game won't be so large it's difficult to complete.

Sam Altman will not return as CEO of OpenAI despite efforts from the company's executives to bring him

An algorithm has spotted a nearly 600-foot, potentially hazardous asteroid near Earth. The tool is intended to find dangerous objects in Earth’s vicinity, to allow scientists to better track them and understand any threat they might pose. The new discovery is the system’s first detection of a “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term that is used for those rocks that are near enough and possibly threatening enough to cause a danger to Earth. An asteroid gets the designation if it is within about 5 million miles of Earth’s orbit. The asteroid, known as 2022 SF289, does not pose any threat to Earth for the foreseeable future. Its closest approach brings it 140,000 miles from Earth – closer to us than the Moon, but still far enough away to be safe. But the creators of the algorithm said that it showed that the system could be used to detect others in the future – some of which may pose a threat to life on Earth. “By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said scientist Ari Heinze, the principal developer of the algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D. Astronomers are looking forward to switching on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in Chile, in 2025. It will allow for a much more detailed view of the night sky. They hope that it can be used to spot more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs. But the extra detail will also make more work for those poring through the data to find them, and so algorithms will be important to helping that work. HelioLinc3D is one such algorithm, and was built specifically to find asteroids within the Rubin observatory’s dataset. Though the equipment is not yet switched on, its creators looked to test whether it would successfully be able to find asteroids when it is looking through that data. The discovery of 2022 SF289 suggests that it will be. It was found in data from the ATLAS survey, based in Hawaii. ATLAS had actually seen the object three times on four separate nights, but an asteroid has to be seen four times on one night to be identified as a near-Earth object. “Any survey will have difficulty discovering objects like 2022 SF289 that are near its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said Denneau. “This in effect gives us a ‘bigger, better’ telescope.” Until now it had also been missed because it was passing in front of the busy and bright stars of the Milky Way. But scientists were able to confirm the existence of the object by looking back through data when they knew where to look. Scientists are aware of 2,350 PHAs already, but expect there are 3,000 out there waiting to be found. “This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night,” said Rubin scientist Mario Jurić, director of the DiRAC Institute, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and leader of the team behind HelioLinc3D. “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large, telescopes.” Read More Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account