The face that the Moon shows to Earth looks far different from the one it hides on its far side. The nearside is dominated by the lunar mare — the vast, dark-colored remnants of ancient lava flows. The crater-pocked far side, on the other hand, is virtually devoid of large-scale mare features. Why the two […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been surveying the surface of Mars since February 2021, has for the first time recorded the acoustic environment of the Red Planet. An international team1 led by an academic at the University of Toulouse III — Paul Sabatier and including scientists from the CNRS and ISAE-SUPAERO, carried out an analysis […]

An international team of scientists has proved that Mercury, our solar system’s smallest planet, has geomagnetic storms similar to those on Earth. The research by scientists in the United States, Canada and China includes work by Hui Zhang, a space physics professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Their finding, a first, answers […]

Parrots are famous for their remarkable cognitive abilities and exceptionally long lifespans. Now, a study led by Max Planck researchers has shown that one of these traits has likely been caused by the other. By examining 217 parrot species, the researchers revealed that species such as the scarlet macaw and sulphur-crested cockatoo have extremely long […]

Scientists studying V Hydrae (V Hya) have witnessed the star’s mysterious death throes in unprecedented detail. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the team discovered six slowly-expanding rings and two hourglass-shaped structures caused by the high-speed ejection of matter out into space. The results of the […]

Our Solar System is believed to have formed from a cloud of gas and dust, the so-called solar nebula, which began to condense on itself gravitationally ~ 4.6 billion years ago. As this cloud contracted, it began to spin and shaped itself into a disk revolving about the highest gravity mass at its centre, which […]

The first worlds beyond our solar system were discovered three decades ago. Since then, close to 5,000 exoplanets have been confirmed in our galaxy. Astronomers have detected another 5,000 planetary candidates — objects that might be planets but have yet to be confirmed. Now, the list of planets has shrunk by at least three. In […]

Our Solar System is believed to have formed from a cloud of gas and dust, the so-called solar nebula, which began to condense on itself gravitationally ~ 4.6 billion years ago. As this cloud contracted, it began to spin and shaped itself into a disk revolving about the highest gravity mass at its centre, which […]

A team of researchers from Purdue University and other institutions have discovered a supermassive black hole binary system, one of only two known such systems. The two black holes, which orbit each other, likely weigh 100 million suns each. One of the black holes powers a massive jet that moves outward at very close to […]

From chatbots that answer tax questions to algorithms that drive autonomous vehicles and dish out medical diagnoses, artificial intelligence undergirds many aspects of daily life. Creating smarter, more accurate systems requires a hybrid human-machine approach, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine. In a study published this month in Proceedings of the National […]

Using the most powerful telescopes on Earth and in space, a team of astronomers has found for the first time blasts of hot, warm and cold winds from a neutron star whilst it consumes matter from a nearby star. The discovery provides new insight into the behaviours of some of the most extreme objects in […]

When two neutron stars spiral into one another and merge to form a black hole — an event recorded in 2017 by gravitational wave detectors and telescopes worldwide — does it immediately become a black hole? Or does it take a while to spin down before gravitationally collapsing past the event horizon into a black […]

Researchers have identified two types of cells in our brains that are involved in organizing discrete memories based on when they occurred. This finding improves our understanding of how the human brain forms memories and could have implications in memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s […]

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, now under construction, will test new technologies for space-based planet hunting. The mission aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars with detail up to a thousand times better than possible with other observatories. Roman will use its Coronagraph Instrument — a system of masks, prisms, detectors, […]

Scientists developed a neural network deep learning technique to extract hidden turbulent motion information from observations of the Sun. Tests on three different sets of simulation data showed that it is possible to infer the horizontal motion from data for the temperature and vertical motion. This technique will benefit solar astronomy and other fields such […]

In a new Nature Astronomy study, an international team led by astrophysicists from the University of California, Irvine and Pomona College report how, when tiny galaxies collide with bigger ones, the bigger galaxies can strip the smaller galaxies of their dark matter — matter that we can’t see directly, but which astrophysicists think must exist […]

A team of astronomers has discovered a rare pair of brown dwarfs that has the widest separation of any brown dwarf binary system found to date. “Because of their small size, brown dwarf binary systems are usually very close together,” said Emma Softich, an undergraduate astrophysics student at the Arizona State University (ASU) School of […]

A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of […]

It has long been known that Mars once had oceans due in part to a protective magnetic field similar to Earth’s. However, the magnetic field disappeared, and new research may finally be able to explain why. Researchers recreated conditions expected in the core of Mars billions of years ago and found that the behavior of […]

Earth’s moon is vitally important in making Earth the planet we know today: the moon controls the length of the day and ocean tides, which affect the biological cycles of lifeforms on our planet. The moon also contributes to Earth’s climate by stabilizing Earth’s spin axis, offering an ideal environment for life to develop and […]

Astronomers have identified two different cases of “mini-Neptune” planets that are losing their puffy atmospheres and likely transforming into super-Earths. Radiation from the planets’ stars is stripping away their atmospheres, driving hot gas to escape like steam from a pot of boiling water. “Most astronomers suspected that young, small mini-Neptunes must have evaporating atmospheres,” says […]

Three newly-discovered planets have been orbiting dangerously close to stars nearing the end of their lives. Out of the thousands of extrasolar planets found so far, these three gas giant planets first detected by the NASA TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Mission, have some of the shortest-period orbits around subgiant or giant stars. One of […]

Imagine being in a place where the winds are so strong that they move at the speed of sound. That’s just one aspect of the atmosphere on XO-3b, one of a class of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), known as hot Jupiters. The eccentric orbit of the planet also leads to seasonal variations hundreds […]

NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars on August 6, 2012, and since then has roamed Gale Crater taking samples and sending the results back home for researchers to interpret. Analysis of carbon isotopes in sediment samples taken from half a dozen exposed locations, including an exposed cliff, leave researchers with three plausible explanations for the […]