All posts tagged: Universe

Miss Universe says six Southeast Asian contestants cannot compete in 2026 pageant

Miss Universe says six Southeast Asian contestants cannot compete in 2026 pageant

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Six contestants from Southeast Asia are likely to miss this year’s Miss Universe after a dispute between the pageant’s two ownership groups put their eligibility in doubt. On 18 September, JKN Universe LLC, the company that owns the Miss Universe brand, said contestants from Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, and Singapore wouldn’t be eligible to compete at the 75th Miss Universe in Puerto Rico in November. In a statement, it said Miss Universe Eastern Pte Ltd, a company run by Thai businessman Nawat Itsaragrisil, had no authority to grant or transfer rights to the Miss Universe brand. It said the franchise agreements for the six countries had been made without a valid licensing agreement with JKN Universe and were therefore “unauthorised” and “void” from …

Mona Awad’s ‘Bunny’ spawned its own weird girl aesthetic universe and a film adaptation

Mona Awad’s ‘Bunny’ spawned its own weird girl aesthetic universe and a film adaptation

Published by Sam Flores

Among novelist Mona Awad’s prized possessions is a handmade rabbit brooch with delicate hanging daggers. It’s a gift from a reader. The present was inspired by Awad’s goth-tinged comic novel “Bunny,” which has garnered a cult following on social platforms like BookTok over the last several years with readers who call themselves “bunnies.” Driven largely by these devoted fans, the book’s sequel “We Love You, Bunny” hits shelves this month in paperback, while Awad hops across the U.S. on her latest book tour. The bunnies are so enamored with Awad’s horror-adjacent satires centered on academia and female friendships (and often compared to “Heathers” and “Mean Girls”), they have created their own online — and offline — aesthetic universe. Their videos and artwork, spanning Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, bring the novels’ surreal, “creepy-cute” aesthetic to life. The fan art features moody Ivy League backdrops with bunny ears, heavy tomes, blood-red candles and saccharine doll-like fashion. It’s a style ripped straight from the book’s antagonists — one of whom wears a pink dress patterned with beheaded …

A cosmic giant 5,000 times the Milky Way’s mass emerges from the early Universe

A cosmic giant 5,000 times the Milky Way’s mass emerges from the early Universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Astronomers have reconstructed detailed three-dimensional maps of two enormous protoclusters seen when the universe was only about 2.1 billion years old, revealing multiple dense clumps connected to the surrounding cosmic web. One structure, COSMOS-z3.1-A, contains 10 distinct density peaks and is so large that researchers classify it as a proto-supercluster, making it the earliest and most distant structure of its kind yet identified. The observations support the “bottom-up” picture of cosmic structure formation, in which smaller concentrations of matter grow and merge along filaments to produce the massive, more rounded galaxy clusters seen in the modern universe. A sprawling network of young galaxies seen more than 11 billion years in the past may represent the earliest known ancestor of one of the universe’s largest structures. The enormous formation, called COSMOS-z3.1-A, existed when the universe was only about 2.1 billion years old. Rather than resembling a mature galaxy cluster, it contains numerous dense clumps woven together by filaments of galaxies and matter. Astronomers now classify it as a proto-supercluster, an exceptionally early predecessor of a future …

Does the expanding Universe stretch space or create new space?

Does the expanding Universe stretch space or create new space?

Published by Jenni Sidey

It’s been nearly a full century, almost 100 years, since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about the nature of our Universe: space itself cannot and does not remain static, but rather evolves with the passage of time. One of the most counterintuitive predictions of Einstein’s general relativity is that any Universe — so long as it’s uniformly (or almost uniformly) filled with one or more species of matter, radiation, or energy — cannot remain both static and stable over time. Instead, it must either expand or contract, something initially derived independently by three separate people: Alexander Friedmann (1922), who did it first on purely theoretical grounds, Georges Lemaître (1927), who was the first to conclude that the Universe was expanding by bringing theory and observation together, and Howard Robertson (1929), who independently reached the same conclusions as Lemaître for a special case of spacetimes, where Robertson’s solution was later generalized by Arthur Walker (1936). Right at around the same time that Friedmann conducted his spectacular work, starting in 1923, observations began to show that the spirals and ellipticals …

This Is the Biggest 2D Map of the Universe. Here’s How to Use It

This Is the Biggest 2D Map of the Universe. Here’s How to Use It

Published by skeptic

Scientists have pointed telescopes at the sky and mapped the cosmos for centuries. That relentless pursuit is producing maps that are bigger and more detailed than ever. But there’s one map that stands out above the rest, and now it’s the largest 2D map of the night sky ever created. The best part? Anyone can play with it.  The map, called Data Release 11 or DR11, comes courtesy of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team at NSF NOIRLab, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, with contributions from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and other agencies and organizations. Covering 75% of the sky across 5.6 trillion pixels, DR11 is the team’s most comprehensive map to date, built upon prior versions of the same map . It expands on DR9 by 50% and brings back northern sky coverage missing from DR10. Based on 263,407 ground-based exposures by 160 scientists, the map catalogs 4 billion objects — including stars, galaxies, black holes and asteroids — in visible and near-infrared light. Already cited in over 1,800 research papers, NOIRLab …

Faint manganese signals could reveal how the universe built its elements

Faint manganese signals could reveal how the universe built its elements

Published by Jenni Sidey

Astronomers calculated 703 forbidden emission transitions from doubly ionized manganese, identifying line ratios that could reveal the temperature and density of supernova remnants and other nebular environments. Manganese is especially valuable because its abundance relative to iron changes as galaxies evolve, potentially allowing astronomers to trace the timing of stellar explosions and chemical enrichment across cosmic history. The work remains theoretical, but several predicted ultraviolet, optical and infrared manganese signatures could eventually be tested with the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based observatories. A faint signal from manganese atoms scattered through exploded stars could give astronomers a new way to reconstruct billions of years of cosmic chemical evolution. The element is difficult to observe, but its abundance changes in a way that may preserve a record of how different generations of stars enriched their galaxies. Researchers have now calculated hundreds of emission lines from doubly ionized manganese, known as Mn III, and identified combinations that could reveal the physical conditions inside supernova remnants, H II regions and other nebulae. The work, recently published in Monthly …

Astronomers Have Completed the Largest Map of Space. Yes, You Can Play With It.

Astronomers Have Completed the Largest Map of Space. Yes, You Can Play With It.

Published by skeptic

The driving force behind our universe’s accelerated expansion remains one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy. While this force, which scientists refer to as dark energy, pervades our universe, we know almost nothing about it. Located on a remote mountain in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has spent the past five years mapping the cosmos with the goal of unraveling this mystery. The result is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created. And now—with the release of the latest version of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, a free online tool for exploring the vast imaging data—you too can poke around the universe. The new map boasts an overwhelming amount of information: 5.6 trillion pixels containing approximately 4 billion celestial objects including stars, galaxies, black holes, and asteroids. It covers approximately 75 percent of the entire sky, recording both visible light and near-infrared wavelengths. Those missing pieces include the deeper parts of space blocked by the stars, space dust, and other matter in our own galaxy, which is a major …

The “perfect cosmological principle” isn’t true for our Universe

The “perfect cosmological principle” isn’t true for our Universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Back in 1923, an unprecedented scientific revolution occurred. Hubble’s discovery of a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda galaxy, M31, opened up the Universe to us, giving us the observational evidence we needed for galaxies beyond the Milky Way and leading us, in short order, to the discovery of the expanding Universe. Credits: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Illustration via NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI) Distances to individual stars were measured beyond the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble’s original plot of galaxy distances, from 1929, versus redshift (left), establishing the expanding Universe, versus a more modern counterpart from approximately 70 years later (right). Many different classes of objects and measurements are used to determine the relationship between distance to an object and its apparent speed of recession that we infer from its light’s relative redshift with respect to us. As you can see, from the very nearby Universe (lower left) to distant locations over a billion light-years away (upper right), this very consistent redshift-distance relation continues to hold. Earlier versions of Hubble’s graph …

Behind the Scenes of Spider-Man Total Universe

Behind the Scenes of Spider-Man Total Universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Spider-Man has been dazzling audiences with his selfless heroics, incredible acrobatics, and unforgettable supporting cast for over 60 years. This complex and immersive legacy is part of what the wallcrawler’s many fans love about him, but for newcomers, it can be more than a little intimidating. How do you summarize such a legacy into a single volume that anyone can understand and appreciate? I interviewed Patrick A. Reed, author of the upcoming book Spider-Man Total Universe, about just that. At 800 pages, you might expect Spider-Man Total Universe to be comprehensive. Not quite! While it does cover just about every major development and character debut since Spidey himself first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15, Reed describes the book as more of a “mixtape” or a “road map that shows the essential landmarks and some can’t-miss sites that I want to steer people toward.” To create that road map, you first need to find an author who already knows Spider-Man inside and out. Reed certainly fits that bill. The Stack Sign up to The Stack to …

JWST finds mysterious red objects pairing up in the early universe

JWST finds mysterious red objects pairing up in the early universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

JWST images have revealed four candidate pairs of “little red dots,” compact early-universe objects increasingly associated with rapidly growing black holes. Two pairs have spectroscopic evidence that both components lie at the same redshift, while statistical tests make simple chance alignment an unlikely explanation for all four systems. If these objects contain growing black holes that eventually merge, such systems could help explain early supermassive black hole growth and become targets for future gravitational-wave observatories. Astronomers analyzing high-resolution infrared observations have identified four candidate pairs of “little red dots,” or LRDs, separated by only a few thousand to several tens of thousands of light-years. The compact objects existed when the universe was only about a billion years old. The findings raise the possibility that some rapidly growing early black holes were being brought together by galaxy interactions, creating systems that could eventually end in black hole mergers. Schematic figure of the pixel-by-pixel color selection method. We construct and color maps using PSF-matched F277W and F444W images. (CREDIT: Takumi Tanaka et al, Publications of the Astronomical …