News (Page 783)

Cosmic fireworks in the clouds: Volunteer detectives sought for Magellanic Clouds Cluster Search Caught in a cosmic dance, our nearest neighbor galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, are cartwheeling and circling each other as they fall toward our galaxy, the Milky Way. The gravitational interaction between the Clouds sparks cosmic fireworks—bursts of star formation as new clusters of stars flame on. How many and what kind of star clusters have been born this way over the history of the Clouds? A new project, the Local Group Cluster Search, invites citizen scientists to help find out! phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

‘Space butterfly’ is home to hundreds of baby stars What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), the butterfly is a nebula—a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly’s two “wings” are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Astronomers investigate supermassive black hole in the radio galaxy PKS 2251+11 Italian astronomers have conducted an X-ray analysis of the accreting supermassive black hole in the broad line radio galaxy PKS 2251+11 as part of a study aimed at investigating the galaxy’s nuclear environment. The new research, presented in a paper published March 15 on arXiv.org, could improve the understanding of active galactic nuclei. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Two new planets discovered using artificial intelligence Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with Google, have used artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover two more hidden planets in the Kepler space telescope archive. The technique shows promise for identifying many additional planets that traditional methods could not catch. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

What happened before the Big Bang? A team of scientists has proposed a powerful new test for inflation, the theory that the universe dramatically expanded in size in a fleeting fraction of a second right after the Big Bang. Their goal is to give insight into a long-standing question: what was the universe like before the Big Bang? phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

The hunt is on for closest Earth-like planets NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is designed to ferret out habitable exoplanets, but with hundreds of thousands of sunlike and smaller stars in its camera views, which of those stars could host planets like our own? phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Race at the edge of the sun: Ions are faster than atoms Scientists at the University of Göttingen, the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris and the Istituto Ricerche Solari Locarno have observed that ions move faster than atoms in the gas streams of a solar prominence. The results of their study were published in The Astrophysical Journal. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Simulating nature’s cosmic laboratory, one helium droplet at a time Two astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and from the University of Jena have found an elegant new method to measure the energy of simple chemical reactions, under similar conditions as those encountered by atoms and molecules in the early solar system. Their method promises accurate measurements of reaction energies that can be used to understand chemical reactions under space conditions – including those reactions that were responsible of creating organic chemicals as the raw material for the development of life. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Icy giant planets in the laboratory Giant planets like Uranus and Neptune may contain much less free hydrogen than previously assumed. Researchers from the German Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) drove shock waves through two types of plastic to reach the same temperatures and pressures present inside such planets, and observed the behavior using ultra-strong X-ray laser pulses. Unexpectedly, one of these plastics kept its crystalline structure even at the most extreme pressures reached. Since the icy giant interiors are made up of the same components as the plastic, planetary models may need to be partially reconsidered, as reported in the journal Scientific Reports. phys.org Go toRead More →

Hubble captures birth of giant storm on Neptune Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope document the formation of a Great Dark Spot on Neptune for the first time, report researchers in a new study. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Study reveals properties of a Type Ib supernova in NGC 4080 A recent study conducted by astronomers has revealed important observational properties of a Type Ib supernova designated MASTER OT J120451.50+265946.6, which exploded in the galaxy NGC 4080. The research, presented in a paper published March 14 on the arXiv pre-print repository, provides crucial hints about the nature of the supernova, what could disclose the progenitor of this stellar explosion. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Jupiter’s unknown journey through the early solar system revealed It is known that gas giants around other stars are often located very near their sun. According to accepted theory, these gas planets were formed far away and subsequently migrated to an orbit closer to the star. Now, researchers from Lund University and other institutions have used advanced computer simulations to learn more about Jupiter’s journey through our own solar system approximately 4.5 billion years ago. At that time, Jupiter was quite recently formed, as were the other planets in the solar system. The planets were gradually built up by cosmic dust, which circled around ourRead More →

What ionized the universe? The sparsely distributed hot gas that exists in the space between galaxies, the intergalactic medium, is ionized. The question is, how? Astronomers know that once the early universe expanded and cooled enough, hydrogen (its main constituent) recombined into neutral atoms. Then, once newly formed massive stars began to shine in the so-called “era of reionization,” their extreme ultraviolet radiation presumably ionized the gas in processes that continue today. One of the key steps, however, is not well understood, namely the extent to which the stellar ionizing radiation escapes from the galaxies into the IGM. Only if the fraction escaping was highRead More →

Volunteers wanted to help unlock the secrets of the universe Scientists are appealing for public help on one of the biggest astronomy projects of the next ten years. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →