news 2017

A huge European astronomy survey, whose results are released today (21 December 2017), has revealed that the view of the Universe provided by traditional optical telescopes is seriously biased. The Herschel ATLAS (H-ATLAS) was a survey carried out by an international team led by researchers at Cardiff University with European Herschel Space Observatory in the far-infrared waveband, which consists of electromagnetic waves with wavelengths 200 times greater than optical light.

Scientists have discovered how the sun's influence on the remote planet Uranus changes its brightness in the sky. Changes in solar activity influence the colour and formation of clouds around the planet, researchers at Oxford and Reading universities found. The icy planet is second furthest from the sun in the solar system and takes 84 Earth years to complete a full orbit - one Uranian year.

An international team including Associate Professor Tara Murphy has been studying a neutron star collision and found an unusual cocoon of debris, raising doubts about the source of short gamma ray bursts. The neutron-star merger announced in October has solved one mystery - where gold comes from - but has also raised other questions, an international team reports in the journal Nature .

Image shows modern Mars (left) dry and barren, compared with the same scene over 3.5 billion years ago covered in water (right). The rocks of the surface were slowly reacting with the water, sequestering it into the Martian mantle leading to the dry, inhospitable scene shown on the left. Image credit: Jon Wade When searching for life, scientists first look for an element key to sustaining it: fresh water.

The center of our Galaxy has been intensely studied for many years, but it still harbors surprises for scientists. A snake-like structure lurking near our galaxy's supermassive black hole is the latest discovery to tantalize astronomers. In 2016, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University reported the discovery of an unusual filament near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy using the NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

A new analysis of the oldest known fossil microorganisms provides strong evidence to support an increasingly widespread understanding that life in the universe is common. The microorganisms, from Western Australia, are 3.465 billion years old.

When scientists recorded a rippling in space-time, followed within two seconds by an associated burst of light observed by dozens of telescopes around the globe, they had witnessed, for the first time, the explosive collision and merger of two neutron stars. The intense cosmological event observed on Aug.

Understanding the nature and origin of cosmic rays is a major goal of modern astrophysics and one that the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is committed to contribute to. In a study published today in the journal Physical Review D , HAWC announces a measurement of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum in the energy range of 10 to 500 TeV, bridging measurements at higher energy usually performed by ground based detectors and measurements at lower energy that previously had been conducted by detectors on satellites and balloons.

A space mission to test how objects fall in a vacuum has released its first results, providing an improved foundation for Einstein's famous theory. The first results of the 'Microscope' satellite mission were announced today by a group of researchers led by the French space agency CNES and including Imperial scientists.

Software developed by Stanford astrophysicist Giacomo Vianello models and combines otherwise incompatible astronomical observations. It contributed to recent research into the origin of antimatter near Earth. A recent study in Science cast doubt on one formerly favored explanation for why an abundance of positrons - the antimatter counterparts of electrons - has been found near Earth.

A team of astronomers, including two from MIT, has detected the most distant supermassive black hole ever observed. The black hole sits in the center of an ultrabright quasar, the light of which was emitted just 690 million years after the Big Bang. That light has taken about 13 billion years to reach us - a span of time that is nearly equal to the age of the universe.

A team of scientists using a state-of-the-art UCLA instrument reports the discovery of a planetary-scale "tug-of-war" of life, deep Earth and the upper atmosphere that is expressed in atmospheric nitrogen. The Earth's atmosphere differs from the atmospheres of most other rocky planets and moons in our solar system in that it is rich in nitrogen gas, or N2; the Earth's atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen gas.

Two giant galaxies seen when the universe was only 780 million years old, or about 5% of its current age, have been identified by an international team involving UCL scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The latest observations push back the epoch of massive-galaxy formation and reveal that these uncommonly large galaxies are nestled inside an even larger cosmic structure, a halo of dark matter several trillion times bigger than the sun.

Dark matter, a mysterious form of matter that makes up about 80 percent of the mass of the universe, has evaded detection for decades. Although it doesn't interact with light, scientists believe it's there because of its influence on galaxies and galaxy clusters. It extends far beyond the reach of the furthest stars in galaxies, forming what scientists call a dark matter halo.

Taking a picture of an exoplanet-a planet in a solar system beyond our sun-is no easy task. The light of a planet's parent star far outshines the light from the planet itself, making the planet difficult to see. While taking a picture of a small rocky planet like Earth is still not feasible, researchers have made strides by snapping images of about 20 giant planet-like bodies.

Launched on 13 October, the Sentinel-5P satellite has delivered its first images of air pollution. Even though the satellite is still being prepared for service, these first results have been hailed as exceptional and show how this latest Copernicus satellite is set to take the task of monitoring air quality into a new era.

Plasmas, gas-like collections of ions and electrons, make up an estimated 99 percent of the visible matter in the universe, including the sun, the stars, and the gaseous medium that permeates the space in between. Most of these plasmas, including the solar wind that constantly flows out from the sun and sweeps through the solar system, exist in a turbulent state.

After an earthquake, there is a disturbance in the field of gravity almost instantaneously. This could be recorded before the seismic waves that seismologists usually analyze. In a study published in Science on December 1, 2017, a team formed of researchers from CNRS, IPGP, the Université Paris Diderot 1 and Caltech has managed to observe these weak signals related to gravity and to understand where they come from.

It seems like even black holes can't resist the temptation to insert themselves unannounced into photographs. A cosmic photobomb found as a background object in images of the nearby Andromeda galaxy has revealed what could be the most tightly coupled pair of supermassive black holes ever seen. As they report in a paper published online Nov.

Citizen scientists have the potential to secure a future for seagrass meadows by collecting new data about the meadows globally, according to the lead author of a new study and a scientific adviser for BBC's Blue Planet II . Led by Cardiff University's Sustainable Places Research Institute along with Swansea University and James Cook University in Australia, the study suggests that citizen scientists may be key to helping answer global questions about seagrass meadows, their location, health, reproductive status and associated fauna.