Astronomers have detected oxygen in a galaxy more than 13 billion light years away — a direct measurement of stars forming and dying in the early universe.
The big picture: The time when stars first formed in the universe is of intense interest to researchers. It is the epoch when matter began clumping together into stars and galaxies, heavy elements started to form, and our universe began to look like it does today.
"We have a theory for why that all happened but precious few observations of when it all started to take shape."
After shooting a copy of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy into space with Elon Musk’s roadster, a Texas-based foundation plans to fire a library to the Moon.
Big picture: The Arch Mission Foundation wants to create off-site "data backups for Earth" to preserve our culture so future humans, should they find it, can learn about our mistakes, says co-founder Nova Spivack. The non-profit plans to send microscopic images of Wikipedia and the Rosetta Project — a digital library of human languages — to the Moon in order to establish a "lunar library" there.
