All Puffed Up with Gas: Little Planets with Big Atmospheres Posing as Large Planets
By Alton Parrish.
Hazes and clouds high up in the atmospheres of exoplanets may make them appear bigger than they really are, according to new research by astronomers at the Space Research Institute (IWF) of the Austrian Academy [...]
What Happens When You Steam a Planet?
By Alton Parrish.
The media often imply that the goal of the hunt for extrasolar planets is to find a rocky planet about the size of Earth orbiting a star like the sun at a distance that would allow liquid water to persist on its [...]
The Universe Is Getting Cleaner as Stars Sweep Up Cosmic Dust
By Alton Parrish.
The Universe is becoming gradually cleaner as more and more cosmic dust is being mopped up by the formation of stars within galaxies, an international team of astronomers has revealed.
Peering back 12 billion [...]
Minor Galaxy Mergers Are Major Drivers of Star Formation
By Alton Parrish.
Around half of the star formation in the local Universe arises from minor mergers between galaxies, according to data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The patch of sky called Stripe 82 is observed repeatedly [...]
Supermassive Black Hole Seeds Could Be Revealed by Gravitational Waves
By Alton Parrish.
Gravitational waves captured by space-based detectors could help identify the origins of supermassive black holes, according to new computer simulations of the Universe.
Scientists led by Durham University’s Institute [...]
Eating Air and Making Fuel
By Alton Parrish.
All life on the planet relies, in one way or another, on a process called carbon fixation: the ability of plants, algae and certain bacteria to “pump” carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment, add [...]
Probing Giant Planets’ Dark Hydrogen
By Alton Parrish.
Hydrogen is the most-abundant element in the universe. It’s also the simplest–sporting only a single electron in each atom. But that simplicity is deceptive, because there is still so much we have to learn [...]
New Dark Spot on Neptune Confirmed
By Alton Parrish.
New images obtained on May 16, 2016, by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm the presence of a dark vortex in the atmosphere of Neptune. Though similar features were seen during the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune [...]
Shredded Star Provides Close-up of ‘Killer’ Black Hole
By Alton Parrish.
Some 3.9 billion years ago in the heart of a distant galaxy, the intense tidal pull of a monster black hole shredded a star that passed too close. When X-rays produced in this event first reached Earth on March [...]
NRL Astrophysicist Probes Theory Of Black-Hole Accretion
By Alton parrish.
Utilizing the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) astrophysicist Dr. Tracy Clarke and an international team [...]
New Way To Turn Waste Plastic into Fuel
By Alton Parrish.
A new way of recycling millions of tons of plastic garbage into liquid fuel has been devised by researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) in China.
“Synthetic [...]
Pluto Likely Has a Liquid Ocean Beneath the Ice Say Researchers
By Alton Parrish.
When the NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft buzzed by Pluto last year, it revealed tantalizing clues that the dwarf planet might have — or had at one time — a liquid ocean sloshing around under its [...]
Venus‘Electric Wind’ Can Strip Earth-like Planets of Oceans, Atmospheres
By Alton Parrish.
Venus has an “electric wind” strong enough to remove the components of water from its upper atmosphere, which may have played a significant role in stripping Earth’s twin planet of its oceans, according [...]
How Black Hole Jets Punch Out of Their Galaxies
By Alton Parrish.
A simulation of the powerful jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centers of the largest galaxies explains why some burst forth as bright beacons visible across the universe, while others fall [...]
Star Cluster Hosts an Excess of Hot Jupiters
Alton Parrish.
An international team of astronomers have found that there are far more planets of the hot Jupiter type than expected in a cluster of stars called Messier 67. This surprising result was obtained using a number [...]
Need to Remember Something? Exercise 4 Hours Later
By Alton Parrish.
A new study suggests an intriguing strategy to boost memory for what you’ve just learned: hit the gym four hours later. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 16 show that physical [...]
Galactic Hearts May Be Smaller Than First Thought; Suggests Co-Evolution of Galaxies and Central Black Hole
By Alton Parrish.
The supermassive black holes found at the centre of every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, may, on average, be smaller than we thought, according to work led by University of Southampton astronomer Dr Francesco [...]
First Detection of Merging Black Holes ‘Perfectly Consistent’ With Northwestern Model
By Alton Parrish
Black hole mosh pit. In this simulation, 60 black holes and 500 stars interact with each other at the chaotic core of a globular cluster until two black holes combine to form a black hole binary.
These [...]
LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for Second Time from Merging Black Holes
By Alton Parrish.
For the second time, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves — ripples through the fabric of space-time, created by extreme, cataclysmic events in the distant universe. The team has determined that the [...]
Prebiotic Molecule Detected in Interstellar Cloud
By Alton Parrish.
Chiral molecules—compounds that come in otherwise identical mirror image variations, like a pair of human hands—are crucial to life as we know it. Living things are selective about which “handedness” [...]