Seriously, Life Really Does Get Around. It was Found in Rocks Deep Beneath the Seafloor After a lot of hard work spanning many years, a team of scientists have discovered something surprising. They’ve found abundant bacterial life in tiny cracks in undersea volcanic rock in the Earth’s crust. The bacteria are thriving in clay deposits […]
Study Finds Bizarre Exoplanet Orbits Around Binary Stars There’s an iconic scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker looks out over the desert landscape of Tatooine at the amazing spectacle of a double sunset. Now, a new study out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) suggests that such far-flung exoplanet worlds […]
WFIRST Will Use Relativity to Find More Exoplanets! When it deploys in 2025, NASA’s WFIRST mission will rely on the gravitational microlensing technique to locate exoplanets near the center of our galaxy. The post WFIRST Will Use Relativity to Find More Exoplanets! appeared first on Universe Today. Universe Today Go to Source
Astronomers Watched a Star System Die About 570 light years from Earth lies WD 1145+017, a white dwarf star. In many respects it’s a typical white dwarf star. Its mass is about 0.6 solar masses, and its temperature is about 15,900 Kelvin. But five years ago, a team of astronomers wrote a paper on the […]
How the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Could be Used to Search for Aliens In the coming years, China’s FAST radio telescope could join in the hunt for extraterrestrials thanks to a partnership with Breakthrough Listen. The post How the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Could be Used to Search for Aliens appeared first on Universe Today. […]
Decaying dark matter should be visible here in the Milky Way as a halo around the galaxy Astronomers are very sure that dark matter exists, but they’re not sure at all what it’s made of. The problem is that it isn’t just dark, it’s invisible. As far as we know, dark matter doesn’t emit light, […]
Weekly Space Hangout: April 8, 2020 – Colonel Mike Mullane, Astronaut Hosts: Fraser Cain (universetoday.com / @fcain) Dave Dickinson (www.astroguyz.com / @astroguyz) Beth Johnson (@planetarypan) Veranika Klimovich ( @VeranikaSpace) This week we are excited to welcome Colonel Mike Mullane to the Weekly Space Hangout. Mike was selected as a Mission Specialist in 1978 in the first group of […]
First-ever photo proof of powerful jet emerging from colliding galaxies A team of Clemson University College of Science researchers, in collaboration with international colleagues, has reported the first definitive detection of a relativistic jet emerging from two colliding galaxies—in essence, the first photographic proof that merging galaxies can produce jets of charged particles that travel […]
Something is lurking in the heart of Quasar 3C 279 One year ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration published the first image of a black hole in the nearby radio galaxy M 87. Now the collaboration has extracted new information from the EHT data on the distant quasar 3C 279: they observed the finest […]
Are gamma-ray bursts powered by a star’s collapsing magnetic fields? When a massive star in a distant galaxy collapses, forming a black hole, two giant jets of light-emitting plasma shoot from its core. These extremely bright gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions in the universe, and when a jet points towards Earth, the […]
X-ray source 3XMM J000511.8+634018 is a polar, study suggests Astronomers from Germany and France have investigated a newly discovered variable X-ray source known as 3XMM J000511.8+634018. Results of the new study suggest that the source is a polar. The finding is detailed in a paper published March 30 on the arXiv pre-print server. phys.org Go […]
What makes Saturn’s atmosphere so hot The upper layers in the atmospheres of gas giants—Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune—are hot, just like Earth’s. But unlike Earth, the Sun is too far from these outer planets to account for the high temperatures. Their heat source has been one of the great mysteries of planetary science. phys.org […]
SpaceX Will be Flying Cargo to the Moon SpaceX was recently awarded a contract through NASA’s Gateway Logistics Services program to provide services to the Lunar Gateway The post SpaceX Will be Flying Cargo to the Moon appeared first on Universe Today. Universe Today Go to Source
Sulfur ‘spices’ alien atmospheres They say variety is the spice of life, and now new discoveries from Johns Hopkins researchers suggest that a certain elemental ‘variety’—sulfur—is indeed a ‘spice’ that can perhaps point to signs of life. phys.org Go to Source
The Milky Way’s satellites help reveal link between dark matter halos and galaxy formation Just as the sun has planets and the planets have moons, our galaxy has satellite galaxies, and some of those might have smaller satellite galaxies of their own. To wit, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a relatively large satellite galaxy visible […]
Researchers provide new clue to solar coronal heating problem Coronal heating is a topic dedicated to explaining how the corona may be heated up to a temperature of millions of degrees, far above that of the photosphere. To transport magnetic energy into the corona, Alfvén-wave turbulence is a promising candidate. However, how the wave is […]
Image: Hubble captures a cannibal galaxy This remarkable spiral galaxy, known as NGC 4651, may look serene and peaceful as it swirls in the vast, silent emptiness of space, but don’t be fooled—it keeps a violent secret. It is believed that this galaxy consumed another smaller galaxy to become the large and beautiful spiral that we […]
Quasar IRAS F11119+3257 has a high velocity two-sided jet, study finds Astronomers have carried out very-long-baseline interferometric (VLBI) observations of the quasar IRAS F11119+3257 using the European VLBI Network (EVN). They found that the object has a high velocity two-sided jet, a finding detailed in a paper published March 25 on the arXiv pre-print repository. […]
Far stars firmly in sight thanks to telescope teamwork Stars far, far away could appear a lot closer when viewed through our telescopes thanks to new research from The Australian National University (ANU). phys.org Go to Source
Origins of Uranus’ oddities explained by Japanese astronomers The ice giant Uranus’ unusual attributes have long puzzled scientists. All of the planets in the solar system revolve around the sun in the same direction and in the same plane, which astronomers believe is a vestige of how our solar system formed from a spinning disc […]
