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Credit: NAOJ The universe is a big place, and by peering across it astronomers get to look back in time . A galaxy or supernova so far away that it takes two billion years for its light to reach us will be seen here as it appeared two billion years ago. Remarkably, today s best telescopes can look across the majority of cosmic time, spying on galaxies as they looked just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazine A chemical analysis of lunar rocks may force scientists to revise the leading theory for the Moon's formation: that the satellite was born when a Mars-sized body smacked into the infant Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. If that were the case, the Moon ought to bear the chemical signature of both Earth and its proposed 'second' parent.

A clock accurate to within a tenth of a second over 14 billion years – the age of the universe – is the goal of research being reported this week by scientists from three different institutions. To be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the research provides the blueprint for a nuclear clock that would get its extreme accuracy from the nucleus of a single thorium ion.

Thar’s gold in them thar hills--and we may have meteorites to thank. Because it appears that a rain of meteors nearly 4 billion years ago peppered the Earth’s exterior with precious metals

Scientists have found opal-like crystals in the Tagish Lake meteorite, which fell to Earth in Canada in 2000. This is the first extraterrestrial discovery of these unusual crystals, which may have formed in the primordial cloud of dust that produced the sun and planets of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago, according to a report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Two billion years ago-- eons before humans developed the first commercial nuclear power plants in the 1950s-- seventeen natural nuclear fission reactors operated in what is today known as Gabon in Western Africa [Figures 1 and 2]. The energy produced by these natural nuclear reactors was modest. The average power output of the Gabon reactors was about 100 kilowatts, which would power about 1,000 lightbulbs

It's the source of a long-standing cosmological quandary. Galaxies or black holes: Which came first?

(PhysOrg.com) -- It is not the same as it used to be, the element finding business. We have discovered and named all the elements from hydrogen (element 1) up to element 112 (copernicium)[1], and last week IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry - it does to elements what the International Astronomical Union did to Pluto), the world governing body for chemistry, has announced the confirmation of a couple more.

A simulation of galactic growth shows how a galaxy akin to our own Milky Way might have appeared 10 billion years ago.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists from the United States and Russia announced today that it has developed a means for computing, with unprecedented accuracy, a tiny, temperature-dependent source of error in atomic clocks.