The Balkan Chronicle

“Dark matter” mystery deepens

Like all ga­lax­ies, most as­tro­no­mers be­lieve ours is filled with a strange, in­vis­i­ble sub­stance that be­trays its pres­ence only through its gravita­t­ional pull. The gal­ax­y’s stars would fly apart with­out this so-called dark mat­ter hold­ing them to­geth­er.

But the na­ture of “dark mat­ter” is a riddle—and a new study has only deep­ened the mys­tery. Now, “we know less about dark mat­ter than we did be­fore,” la­ment­ed Matt Walk­er of the Har­vard-Smith­son­ian Cen­ter for As­t­ro­phys­ics in Cam­bridge, Mass., lead au­thor of a re­port on the work to ap­pear in the The As­t­ro­phys­i­cal Jour­nal.

Mysterious force holds back Nasa probe in deep space

A space probe launched 30 years ago has come under the influence of a force that has baffled scientists and could rewrite the laws of physics.

Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.

Darkest Planet Found: Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light

It may be hard to imagine a planet blacker than coal, but that's what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA's Kepler space telescope.

Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Yet the apparently inky world appears to reflect almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study.

Water Found on the Moon

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA's LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

The Last Shuttle Leaves an Era Behind

There was a time, some of us remember, when a countdown at Canaveral stopped the world in its tracks. On television or at the launching, every breath was held at liftoff and every eye followed the fiery plume of ascent, up and away. Godspeed, said someone who was everyone.

That was a half century ago, when men first squeezed into their machines and, defying gravity, rode into a new dimension of human experience. Unbound to Earth, our species could imagine that an age of spacefaring was truly under way, the Moon and Mars within reach, maybe even an asteroid where the Little Prince awaited our visit. The promised new reality legitimized fantasies.

A Young Pulsar Shows Its Hand

A small, dense object only 12 miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. At the center of this image made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand.

In this image, the lowest energy X-rays that Chandra detects are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. Astronomers think that B1509 is about 1,700 years old and it is located about 17,000 light years away.