Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity. The planet, GJ 1132 b, is hypothesized to have begun as a gaseous world with a thick hydrogen blanket of atmosphere. Starting out at several times […]

An atmosphere is what makes life on Earth’s surface possible, regulating our climate and sheltering us from damaging cosmic rays. But although telescopes have counted a growing number of rocky planets, scientists had thought most of their atmospheres long lost. However, a new study by University of Chicago and Stanford University researchers suggests a mechanism […]

We are made of stardust, the saying goes, and a pair of studies including University of Michigan research finds that may be more true than we previously thought. The first study, led by U-M researcher Jie (Jackie) Li and published in Science Advances, finds that most of the carbon on Earth was likely delivered from […]

A new study has found the first evidence of sophisticated breathing organs in 450-million-year-old sea creatures. Contrary to previous thought, trilobites were leg breathers, with structures resembling gills hanging off their thighs. Trilobites were a group of marine animals with half-moon-like heads that resembled horseshoe crabs, and they were wildly successful in terms of evolution. […]

The humble lab mouse has provided invaluable clues to understanding diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes to COVID-19. But when it comes to psychiatric conditions, the lab mouse has been sidelined, its rodent mind considered too different from that of humans to provide much insight into mental illness. A new study, however, shows there are […]

A single “super photon” made up of many thousands of individual light particles: About ten years ago, researchers at the University of Bonn produced such an extreme aggregate state for the first time and presented a completely new light source. The state is called optical Bose-Einstein condensate and has captivated many physicists ever since, because […]

A paper by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Director Ooguri Hirosi and Project Researcher Matthew Dodelson on the string theoretical effects outside the black hole photon sphere has been selected for the “Editors’ Suggestion” of the journal Physical Review D. In a quantum theory of point particles, […]

The SwRI-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) orbiting Jupiter aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft has detected new faint aurora features, characterized by ring-like emissions, which expand rapidly over time. SwRI scientists determined that charged particles coming from the edge of Jupiter’s massive magnetosphere triggered these auroral emissions. “We think these newly discovered faint ultraviolet features originate millions of […]

Scientists reported new research results suggesting that artificial objects in orbit around the Earth are brightening night skies on our planet significantly more than previously understood. The research, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, finds that the number of objects orbiting Earth could elevate the overall brightness of the […]

Though our galaxy is an immense city of at least 200 billion stars, the details of how they formed remain largely cloaked in mystery.Scientists know that stars form from the collapse of huge hydrogen clouds that are squeezed under gravity to the point where nuclear fusion ignites. But only about 30 percent of the cloud’s […]

A radio telescope located in outback Western Australia has observed a cosmic phenomenon with a striking resemblance to a jellyfish.Published in The Astrophysical Journal, an Australian-Italian team used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to observe a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2877. Lead author and PhD candidate Torrance Hodgson, from the Curtin University […]

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, a team of astronomers has directly measured winds in Jupiter’s middle atmosphere for the first time. By analysing the aftermath of a comet collision from the 1990s, the researchers have revealed incredibly powerful winds, with speeds of up […]

Astronomers have long been looking into the vast universe in hopes of discovering alien civilisations. But for a planet to have life, liquid water must be present. The chances of that finding scenario have seemed impossible to calculate because it has been the assumption that planets like Earth get their water by chance if a […]

Volcanic rock samples collected during NASA’s Apollo missions bear the isotopic signature of key events in the early evolution of the Moon, a new analysis found. Those events include the formation of the Moon’s iron core, as well as the crystallization of the lunar magma ocean — the sea of molten rock thought to have […]

With the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered and studied in detail the most distant source of radio emission known to date. The source is a “radio-loud” quasar — a bright object with powerful jets emitting at radio wavelengths — that is so far away its light […]

Astronomers have discovered new hints of a giant, scorching-hot planet orbiting Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky.The research, published this month in The Astrophysical Journal, was led by University of Colorado Boulder student Spencer Hurt, an undergraduate in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.It focuses on an iconic and relatively […]

Determining how rapidly the universe is expanding is key to understanding our cosmic fate, but with more precise data has come a conundrum: Estimates based on measurements within our local universe don’t agree with extrapolations from the era shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. A new estimate of the local expansion rate […]

The earliest multicellular organisms may have lacked heads, legs, or arms, but pieces of them remain inside of us today, new research shows.According to a UC Riverside study, 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures from the Ediacaran period share genes with today’s animals, including humans. “None of them had heads or skeletons. Many of them probably looked like […]

A team of international researchers went back to the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago to gain new insights into the cosmic origin of the heaviest elements on the periodic table.Led by scientists who collaborate as part of the International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA) and the Joint Institute for Nuclear […]

Red supergiants are a class of star that end their lives in supernova explosions. Their lifecycles are not fully understood, partly due to difficulties in measuring their temperatures. For the first time, astronomers develop an accurate method to determine the surface temperatures of red supergiants. Stars come in a wide range of sizes, masses and […]

A study, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and carried out with OSIRIS, an instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has found the most densely populated galaxy cluster in formation in the primitive universe.The researchers predict that this structure, which is at a distance of 12.5 billion light years […]

Astronomers have long been looking into the vast universe in hopes of discovering alien civilisations. But for a planet to have life, liquid water must be present. The chances of that finding scenario have seemed impossible to calculate because it has been the assumption that planets like Earth get their water by chance if a […]

New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds […]

Viruses are the most numerous biological entities on the planet. Now researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have identified over 140,000 viral species living in the human gut, more than half of which have never been seen before. The paper, published in Cell, contains an analysis of over 28,000 […]

With the help of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, and other ground-based telescopes, astronomers have confirmed that a faint object discovered in 2018 and nicknamed “Farfarout” is indeed the most distant object yet found in our Solar System. The object has just received its designation from the International Astronomical Union.Farfarout was […]

Fast and energy-efficient future data processing technologies are on the horizon after an international team of scientists successfully manipulated magnets at the atomic level. Physicist Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy from Lancaster University said: “With stalling efficiency trends of current technology, new scientific approaches are especially valuable. Our discovery of the atomically-driven ultrafast control of magnetism opens […]

Current electronic components in computers, mobile phones and many other devices are based on microstructured silicon carriers. However, this technology has almost reached its physical limits and the smallest possible structure sizes. Two-dimensional (2D) materials are therefore being intensively researched. One can imagine these materials as extremely thin films consisting of only one layer of […]

Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar systems, in which stars are packed closely together. They are also typically very old — the globular cluster that is the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the Universe itself. It resides 7800 light-years away, making it one of the closest globular clusters to […]

Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have detected the first Jupiter-like planet without clouds or haze in its observable atmosphere. The findings were published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.Named WASP-62b, the gas giant was first detected in 2012 through the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) South survey. Its […]

Astronomers may have found our galaxy’s first example of an unusual kind of stellar explosion. This discovery, made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, adds to the understanding of how some stars shatter and seed the universe with elements critical for life on Earth. This intriguing object, located near the center of the Milky Way, is […]

An international research team including members from The University of Manchester has shown that a rapidly rotating neutron star is at the core of a celestial object now known as PSR J2039-5617 The international collaboration used novel data analysis methods and the enormous computing power of the citizen science project Einstein@Home to track down the […]

The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is a carnivorous plant that encloses its prey using modified leaves as a trap. During this process, electrical signals known as action potentials trigger the closure of the leaf lobes. An interdisciplinary team of scientists has now shown that these electrical signals generate measurable magnetic fields. Using atomic magnetometers, it […]

It was previously thought that collisions between galaxies would necessarily add to the activity of the massive black holes at their centers. However, researchers have performed the most accurate simulations of a range of collision scenarios and have found that some collisions can reduce the activity of their central black holes. The reason is that […]

A remarkable prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity — the theory that connects space, time, and gravity — is that rotating black holes have enormous amounts of energy available to be tapped. For the last 50 years, scientists have tried to come up with methods to unleash this power. Nobel physicist Roger Penrose theorized […]

Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that our planet is plunging towards the black hole. Instead the changes are results of a better model of the Milky Way Galaxy based on […]