Space: Structures and Features
Published

'Black hole police' discover a dormant black hole outside our galaxy      (via sciencedaily.com) 

A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own. The researchers found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Neutrino factories in deep outer space      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Highly energetic and difficult to detect, neutrinos travel billions of light years before reaching our planet. Although it is known that these elementary particles come from the depths of our Universe, their precise origin is still unknown. Researchers are now shedding light on one aspect of this mystery: neutrinos are thought to be born in blazars, galactic nuclei fed by supermassive black holes.

Space: Exploration Space: The Solar System
Published

What a Martian meteorite can teach us about Earth's origins      (via sciencedaily.com) 

What do Mars and Iceland have in common? These days, not so much. But more than 4.5 billion years ago, it's possible the Red Planet had a crust comparable to Iceland today. This discovery, hidden in the oldest martian fragments found on Earth, could provide information about our planet that was lost over billions of years of geological movement and could help explain why the Earth developed into a planet that sustains a broad diversity of life and Mars did not.

Space: Exploration Space: Structures and Features
Published

NASA Reveals Webb Telescope's first images of unseen universe      (via sciencedaily.com) 

NASA has revealed groundbreaking new views of the cosmos from the James Webb Space Telescope. The images include the deepest infrared view of our universe that has ever been taken.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Undead planets: The unusual conditions of the first exoplanet detection      (via sciencedaily.com) 

The first ever exoplanets were discovered 30 years ago around a rapidly rotating star, called a pulsar. Now, astronomers have revealed that these planets may be incredibly rare.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

The ultimate fate of a star shredded by a black hole      (via sciencedaily.com) 

In 2019, astronomers observed the nearest example to date of a star that was shredded, or 'spaghettified,' after approaching too close to a massive black hole. That tidal disruption of a sun-like star by a black hole 1 million times more massive than itself took place 215 million light years from Earth. Luckily, this was the first such event bright enough that astronomers could study the optical light from the stellar death, specifically the light's polarization, to learn more about what happened after the star was torn apart.

Space: The Solar System
Published

Porosity of the moon's crust reveals bombardment history      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers find that, early in its history, the moon was highly porous, which was likely a result of early, massive impacts that shattered much of the crust. They reached their conclusions with simulations and data from NASA's GRAIL mission.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Shedding new light on dark matter      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A team of physicists has developed a method for predicting the composition of dark matter -- invisible matter detected only by its gravitational pull on ordinary matter and whose discovery has been long sought by scientists.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

8000 kilometers per second: Star with the shortest orbital period around black hole discovered      (via sciencedaily.com) 

A newly discovered star only takes four years to travel around the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Gemini North spies ultra-faint fossil galaxy discovered on outskirts of Andromeda      (via sciencedaily.com) 

An unusual ultra-faint dwarf galaxy has been discovered on the outer fringes of the Andromeda Galaxy thanks to the sharp eyes of an amateur astronomer. Follow-up by professional astronomers revealed that the dwarf galaxy -- Pegasus V -- contains very few heavier elements and is likely to be a fossil of the first galaxies.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Falling stardust, wobbly jets explain blinking gamma ray bursts      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Astrophysicists have developed the first 3D simulation of the entire evolution of a jet -- from its birth by a rotating black hole to its emission far from the collapsing star. Simulation shows that as the star collapses, its material falls on the disk that swirls around the black hole. This falling material tilts the disk, and, in turn, tilts the jet, which wobbles as it struggles to return to its original trajectory. The wobbling jet explains the longstanding mystery of why gamma ray bursts blink and shows that these bursts are even rarer than previously thought.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Physicists confront the neutron lifetime puzzle      (via sciencedaily.com) 

To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can 'live' outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our left-handed universe. They designed a mind-bending experiment to try to detect a particle that has been speculated but not spotted. If found, the theorized 'mirror neutron' -- a dark-matter twin to the neutron -- could explain a discrepancy between answers from two types of neutron lifetime experiments and provide the first observation of dark matter.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Long-term liquid water also on non-Earth-like planets?      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Liquid water is an important prerequisite for life to develop on a planet. As researchers report in a new study, liquid water could also exist for billions of years on planets that are very different from Earth. This calls our currently Earth-centred idea of potentially habitable planets into question.

Space: Structures and Features
Published

Flicker from the dark: Reading between the lines to model our galaxy's central black hole      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers have shown in a single model the full story of how gas travels in the center of the Milky Way -- from being blown off by stars to falling into the black hole.

Space: The Solar System
Published

Scientists map sulfur residue on Jupiter's icy moon Europa      (via sciencedaily.com) 

A team has used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe Jupiter's moon, Europa, at ultraviolet wavelengths, filling in a 'gap' in the various wavelengths used to observe this icy water world. The team's near-global UV maps show concentrations of sulfur dioxide on Europa's trailing side.

Space: The Solar System
Published

Scientists identify a possible source for Charon's red cap      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Scientists combined data from NASA's New Horizons mission with novel laboratory experiments and exospheric modeling to reveal the likely composition of the red cap on Pluto's moon Charon and how it may have formed. This first-ever description of Charon's dynamic methane atmosphere using new experimental data provides a fascinating glimpse into the origins of this moon's red spot as described in two recent articles.

Space: The Solar System
Published

How elliptical craters could shed light on age of Saturn's moons      (via sciencedaily.com) 

A new study describes how unique populations of craters on two of Saturn's moons could help indicate the satellites' age and the conditions of their formation. Using data from NASA's Cassini mission, researchers have surveyed elliptical craters on Saturn's moons Tethys and Dione for this study.

Space: The Solar System
Published

A blueprint for life forms on Mars?      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Microbes taken from surface sediment near Lost Hammer Spring, Canada, about 900 km south of the North Pole, could provide a blueprint for the kind of life forms that may once have existed, or may still exist, on Mars.

Space: Structures and Features Space: The Solar System
Published

Martian meteorite upsets planet formation theory      (via sciencedaily.com) 

A new study of an old meteorite contradicts current thinking about how rocky planets like the Earth and Mars acquire volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and noble gases as they form.

Space: Structures and Features Space: The Solar System
Published

Dead star's cannibalism of its planetary system is most far-reaching ever witnessed      (via sciencedaily.com) 

The violent death throes of a nearby star so thoroughly disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind -- known as a white dwarf -- is sucking in debris from both the system's inner and outer reaches, astronomers report.