The Most Distant Confirmed Galaxy

The Most Distant Confirmed Galaxy

The authors of this work report the discovery of the most distant, spectroscopically-confirmed galaxy found to date, which presently lies about 30 billion light years from Earth. The galaxy is being observed as it was at a time just 700 million years after the Big Bang, which is a mere 5% of the universe’s current age of 13.8 billion years.

In Search of the First Habitable Exomoon

In Search of the First Habitable Exomoon

The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project has conducted the first ever search for a moon around a planet in the habitable zone. While they find no evidence for such a moon, they demonstrate that Earth-sized and possibly habitable moons should be easily detectable with the current Kepler data.

Closing in on Dark Matter?

Closing in on Dark Matter?

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment has found signatures in its data consistent with a dark matter Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. While not confident enough to declare a dark matter discovery, they estimate that there is only a 0.2% chance that these signatures are caused by random chance.