A “soup” of molecules in a distant star-forming cloud contains compounds that are considered the essential building blocks for life, astronomers have found.
These molecules can contribute to the construction of amino-acids, which themselves form the basis of genetic material and are believed to have been essential in the development of the first microorganisms on Earth.
A new study is revealing that a reversal in the Earth’s magnetic poles 42,000 to 41,000 years ago may have led to environmental crises that resulted in mass extinctions. The period is called the Laschamps excursion and the research used precise carbon dating obtained from ancient tree fossils to study its effects.
Astronomers studying the formation of a distant star have discovered a cloud of water in space. The water, which is both regular water as we know it from Earth, as well as heavy water – water where one of the hydrogen atoms has been replaced by deuterium – could offer new insights into the origins of water in our solar system.
Stars are basically spherical, and when they explode, the explosions are spherical too. Most of the time.
But an international team of astronomers has observed a disc-shaped explosion – the thinnest yet known to science.
The explosion is called a Fast Blue Optical Transient (FBOT): a rare event that astronomers have only known about for the past five years. They’re also called ‘cows’.
Astronomers have observed a rare case of a galaxy shapeshifting.
A few decades ago, an object located some 630 million light-years away named PBC J2333.9-2343 was classified as a giant radio galaxy. It projected large, radio-emitting structures perpendicular to our line of sight, formed by colossal jets that once erupted from the galactic center.
A new map derived with the help of artificial intelligence reveals previously unknown “bridges” linking galaxies in the local universe. The bridges are in the form of filamentary structures. The scientists hope their map, published along with their paper in the Astrophysical Journal, can provide fresh insights into dark matter and the history of our universe.
While dark matter is an accepted notion, thought to make up 80 percent of all the matter in the universe, it has been hard to find. Scientists have, however, inferred much about the existence and behavior of dark matter by observing its gravitational influence on other space objects.
In a distant galaxy, a supermassive black hole spewing radiation at near light speed has shifted its angle by a whopping 90 degrees to point directly toward Earth — a sharp turn that’s puzzling physicists.
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the hungry black holes at the cores of many other galaxies, and they accrete matter and spew powerful jets of high-energy particles known as relativistic jets. AGN are classified according to what part of the AGN is pointed toward Earth.
Scientists stand ready to manipulate quantum light, just as Albert Einstein envisioned in 1916.
Researchers from the University of Sydney and the University of Basel successfully managed to manipulate and identify small numbers of interacting photons—packets of light energy. According to the team, this work represents an unprecedented landmark development for quantum technologies.
We met Caroline Piaulet, Ph.D. Student at Institut Trottier de recherche sur les exoplanètes (iREx) from Université de Montréal (Canada). Team led by Caroline Piaulet, did a detailed study of the planetary system Kepler-138. More precisely, it discovered two “water worlds“: two exoplanets full of water that orbit around the Red Dwarf Star, about 218 light-years away from Earth. A light-year is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (5.88 trillion miles).
On July 5, 2022, NASA’s Juno probe did its 43rd close flyby of Jupiter. It studied the colors and shapes of the clouds on the giant planet.
Bjorn Jónsson, a citizen scientist, used raw data from the JunoCam instrument on the spacecraft to make these two photos. When the raw photo was taken, Juno was about 3,300 miles (5,300 km) away from Jupiter’s cloud tops and about 50 degrees north of the planet. The north is on the rise. At the time, the spacecraft was moving away from the earth at about 209,000 km per hour (130,000 mph).