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Watch This Dark Volcanic Ash Creep Across the Red Planet Mars is well known as a static, frozen desert. We tend to think of the only thing changing on the surface of the Red Planet is due to the occasional dust storm. But if you look closely – and are willing to wait decades – you’ll see the planet is very much alive – at least in the environmental sense. The European Space Agency just released some spectacular new images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on its Mars Express Orbiter, one of which shows a surprisingly “fast” geological change happening in Utopia Planitia.Read More →

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What Happens When Light Goes Boom? Part 2: The Crowd, the Molasses, and the Speed of Light (Sort Of) Before Brad Bradington can sprint down the red carpet, we need to understand the crowd. Specifically, we need to understand why a crowd of atoms and molecules slows down light — and why that creates a loophole that changes everything. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Early Galaxies Were Surrounded by Huge Clouds of Hydrogen, and Astronomers Found a Whole Bunch! Astronomers using data from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Webb’s Little Red Dots may reveal how giant black holes formed soon after the Big Bang The launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2021 pushed the horizon of seeing the early universe, unveiling cosmic events just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Among the most striking discoveries are supermassive black holes—some reaching 100 million times the mass of our sun. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Weighing in on the mystery of the gravitational constant The time had come to open the envelope, but Stephan Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), wasn’t sure he wanted to know the secret number that lay inside. For the past 10 years, Schlamminger had spent most of his working hours trying to measure a single quantity, known as the universal gravitational constant, which determines the strength of gravity everywhere in the universe. The secret number would allow Schlamminger to unscramble his data and get his answer. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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eROSITA disentangles the solar system’s X-ray glow from deep-space signals Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics scientists have been able to disentangle the X-ray glow originating in our solar system from similar emission reaching us from deep space, using data from the SRG/eROSITA space telescope. Four sky maps obtained between 2019 and 2021 from a vantage point approximately 1.5 million km from Earth—approximately four times the moon’s distance—enabled the extraction of solar-wind charge exchange (SWCX) emission. The research is published in the journal Science. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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The Moon Might Be More Prone To Fires Engineers love a good practical challenge, especially when it comes to spaceflight. But there’s one particular challenge facing the crewed missions of the near future that scares mission planners above almost all others – fire. For decades, we’ve relied on a NASA test known as NASA-STD-6001B to screen material flammability for flight. But space is much more complicated than an Earth-bound test provides for. A new paper from researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Johnson Space Center and Case Western Reserve University details a planned mission to test the flammability of materials on the Moon’s surfaceRead More →

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Solar flares’ domino effect isn’t limited to the sun, 16,000-star sweep reveals Our sun is a roiling mass of energy, with solar flares exploding on its surface, sending gas, plasma, and light that blasts across the solar system. When radiation from extra-powerful flares breaks through Earth’s outer protective magnetosphere, it can affect satellites and even electric grids and cause the aurora borealis—lighting up the night sky. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Why NASA’s Cheapest Missions Produce the Least Science To say NASA has been undergoing some massive administrative changes lately is a huge understatement. One of the more concerning ones, according to a new paper at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Ari Koeppel and Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, is the trend towards the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” – which they argue doesn’t work very well when it comes to producing valuable science. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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ALMA confirms rare quasar pair at redshift 5.7 in merging galaxies Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have discovered a close pair of quasars, which is a result of a distant massive galaxy merger. The detection of the quasar pair was detailed in a research paper published April 7 on the arXiv pre-print server. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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‘Dancing jets’ from black hole reveal an immense power equivalent to 10,000 suns New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes, confirming scientists’ theories of how black holes help shape the structure of the universe. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Extended coronal line emission and new clues to a possible dual AGN in the merger J1356+1026 M. Bianchin, C. Ramos Almeida, O. Gonz’alez-Mart’in, M. V. Zanchettin, M. Carneiro, M. Pereira-Santaella, C. Tadhunter, G. Speranza, I. Garc’ia-Bernete, A. Audibert, A. Alonso-Herrero, D. Rigopoulou, A. Labiano, J. A. Acosta-Pulido, S. Garc’ia-Burillo arXiv:2604.08239v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging luminous galaxies are ideal laboratories to study some of the most extreme astrophysical phenomena. The local (z=0.1232) obscured quasar J1356+1026 has two nuclei, North and South (J1356N and J1356S), but despite numerous efforts, J1356S had not yet been confirmed as an AGN. Thanks to the superb sensitivity and spatial resolutionRead More →

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What Happens When Light Goes Boom? Part 1: The Scientist Who Stared at a Glow In 1934, a Soviet physicist named Pavel Cherenkov shone gamma rays into a bottle of water and noticed a faint blue glow. So had others before him. They all shrugged and moved on. Cherenkov didn’t. What he found — by refusing to dismiss something he didn’t understand — turned into one of the most useful phenomena in modern physics. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Where’s the Dividing Line Between A Star and A Planet? Ask the JWST. It’s obvious that Earth is a planet. It’s obvious that the Sun is a star. But for substellar objects like brown dwarfs, it’s not so clear. Researchers are using the JWST to find a stronger dividing line between star and planet that depends on how they formed. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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‘Interstellar glaciers’: NASA’s SPHEREx maps vast galactic ice regions NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission has mapped interstellar ice at an unprecedented scale. Covering regions in our Milky Way galaxy more than 600 light-years across, the ice was found inside giant molecular clouds—vast regions of gas and dust where dense clumps of matter collapse under gravity, giving birth to stars. A study describing these findings was published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Astronomers crack a decades-old mystery, catching gas morphing into planet-building disks around newborn stars An international team led by Dr. Indrani Das of Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) has shown, for the first time, how infalling gas from star-forming cores gradually transitions into planet-forming disks. Their findings, combining numerical simulations with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations, are published today in The Astrophysical Journal. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Dark matter could explain the earliest supermassive black holes A growing mystery in astronomy is the presence of gargantuan black holes—some weighing as much as a billion suns—existing less than a billion years after the Big Bang. According to the standard theory of black hole formation, these black holes simply should not have had enough time to grow so large. A study led by University of California, Riverside graduate student Yash Aggarwal shows that dark matter decays could be the key to understanding the origin of these cosmic behemoths. Published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the research shows that the energy releasedRead More →

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JWST Sees Smoking Gun for Black Hole Mergers in the Virgo Cluster A pair of dwarf galaxies in the giant Virgo Cluster show what can happen when these stellar cities interact. Scientists at the University of Michigan focused the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) onto the galaxies NGC 4486B and UCD736 and found each of them sporting “overmassive” black holes at or near their hearts. Those supermassive black holes comprise a large fraction of each galaxy’s mass. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →