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 […]