Devoid

The opening night of the Liam Gallagher John Squire tour is full of fans who’d listen to the two rock’n’roll heroes play the phonebook. Unfortunately the Oasis singer and Stone Roses guitarist put that loyalty to the test – and not only because Gallagher lists colours on psychedelic, stomping opener Just Another Rainbow.Currently UK No 1, their self-titled album blends Gallagher’s brusque swagger with Squire’s fluid songwriting, then filters it through 60s rock and Britpop nostalgia. Clearly both musicians thrive in a…

A mysterious ancient graveyard that has flummoxed Finnish archaeologists for decades could be one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries in northern Europe, a new study suggests.Located on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Tainiaro, a place of long and bitter winters, the site was first unearthed in 1959 and studied again in the late 1980s, but the findings of those excavations never saw the light of day.Thousands of artifacts were described, and archeologists later discovered the sandy soils were tinged with ash and…

Glaciers in the Arctic are not nearly as devoid of life as they might appear at first sight.In fact, carpets of ice and snow in Greenland and Iceland are practically crawling with microscopic life forms.Like seasonal zombies, many of these organisms lie dormant in winter, waking from their frozen slumber only with the summer melt."A small puddle of meltwater on a glacier can easily have 4,000 different species living in it," says microbiologist Alexandre Anesio from Aarhus University in Sweden."They live on bacteria,…

The Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, captured this dazzling image of the so-called Taffy Galaxies — UGC 12914 and UGC 12915. Their twisted appearance is the result of a head-on collision that occurred about 25 million years prior to their appearance in this image. A bridge of highly turbulent gas devoid of significant star formation spans the gap between the two galaxies.Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image Processing: M.…

When you ask an astronomer about dark matter, they will always mention about how the cosmos is filled with this enigmatic, unseen stuff. It is specifically found in the halos that encircle the majority of galaxies. The galaxy itself, as well as other galaxies nearby, are strongly gravitationally influenced by the mass of the halo. That has been the accepted theory on dark matter and how it affects galaxies. The concept of such halos is not without flaws, though. Evidently, there are certain weirdly shaped dwarf galaxies…

Ask astronomers about dark matter and one of the things they talk about is that this invisible, mysterious 'stuff' permeates the universe. In particular, it exists in halos surrounding most galaxies.  The mass of the halo exerts a strong gravitational influence on the galaxy itself, as well as on others in the neighborhood. That's pretty much the standard view of dark matter and its influence on galaxies.However, there are problems with the idea of those halos. Apparently, some oddly shaped dwarf galaxies exist that look…