We’re not sure if it’s exciting or not that scientists just discovered new ‘lifeforms’ inside of our bodies. Tiny bits of RNA, smaller than a virus, colonize bacteria inside our mouths and guts and have the power to transfer information that can be read by a cell.
Dubbed ‘wildly weird’ by the team of Stanford scientists writing about the find in Nature, the discovery now has a name: obelisks. And we… don’t really know their end goal.
From a teddy bear on Mars to Godzilla in a gas cloud, it’s easy to see pretty much anything you want on the seemingly infinite canvas of space. And this year, on Valentine’s Day, we choose to see love.
Heart-shaped objects are plentiful across the cosmos and come from a variety of sources — from extreme events like galactic collisions to the random side effects of brightly burning stars. Here are five of our favorites.
According to new research, the core of the Earth is cooling much faster and sooner than originally anticipated — a new mystery that could throw a wrench in our understanding of the planet’s evolution.
To get a better sense of how far along the Earth is in the process, scientists are studying the thermal conductivity of the minerals present in the layer between the planet’s core and mantle. The faster that hot center passes heat to the planet’s outer layers, the faster the Earth is losing the heat present in its core.
A group of researchers have posed a fascinating — and downright mind bending — thought experiment: If a planet like Earth can be “alive,” can it also have a mind of its own?
The team published a paper exploring this question in the International Journal of Astrobiology. In it, they present the idea of “planetary intelligence,” which describes the collective knowledge and cognition of an entire planet.
We’ve all been mesmerized by the images that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been sending back to Earth. Webb captures its views of the universe in both near-infrared and mid-infrared light, in unprecedented detail. NASA just released its latest batch of images on January 29, 2024, and they are spectacular. The new photos show 19 spiral galaxies, all of which appear face-on toward Earth. They are the highest-resolution images of these galaxies ever obtained so far.
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Link submitted by Gene Savoy, Jr.
How do you build a giant black hole in the early universe? Start with the explosions of lots of little ones, a counterintuitive new preprint study proposes.
Numerous observations, especially with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), have revealed ironclad evidence that the young universe was populated by incredibly massive black holes. Although astronomers can’t see the black holes directly, they do observe quasars — ultrabright objects powered by supermassive black holes.
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured scintillating images of 19 spiral galaxies — and the millions of stars that call them home — in unprecedented detail never seen before by astronomers.
Webb’s singular ability to observe the universe in different wavelengths of infrared light, such as near-infrared and mid-infrared, showcases the stars, gas and dust within the intricate structure of each galaxy.
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Link Submitted by Gene Savoy, Jr.
Since 2019, astronomers have puzzled over odd radio circles (ORCs), curious rings that pop up in sky surveys at radio wavelengths. At least one of the rings was likely caused by a burst of stars that formed in a distant galaxy and then exploded, blasting gas out into surrounding space, a team of astronomers told the American Astronomical Society meeting in New Orleans today. When that gas hits slower moving gas around the galaxy, it created a shock wave that generated an eerie ORC more than 10 times as wide as the Milky Way.
Using the first dataset released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of scientists have discovered something surprising– evidence of six massive galaxies that existed during the early days of our universe.
“These objects are way more massive than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, an astronomer and astrophysicist at Penn State University, in a statement. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”
A nebula can look like a lot of different animals—a crab, tarantula, seagull, a cat’s eye, and even a chicken on the run. The European Southern Observatory’s VLT Survey Telescope in Chile took a new 1.5-billion-pixel image of IC 2944 aka the Running Chicken Nebula. It is located roughly 6,500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus and this new image shows the nebula in new detail.