news 2020

UChicago scientist lays out how LIGO gravitational waves could be scrambled, yielding information There's something a little off about our theory of the universe. Almost everything fits, but there's a fly in the cosmic ointment, a particle of sand in the infinite sandwich. Some scientists think the culprit might be gravity-and that subtle ripples in the fabric of space-time could help us find the missing piece.

How stars form in galaxies remains a major open question in astrophysics. A new UZH study sheds new light on this topic with the help of a data-driven re-analysis of observational measurements. The star-formation activity of typical, nearby galaxies is found to scale proportionally with the amount of gas present in these galaxies.

There's been a lot going on in 2020, so nobody can be blamed for missing a few things. But amid a tumultuous year in which many pivoted to COVID-19 research , University of Chicago scholars and scientists have also been hard at work continuing to understand the planet and the universe we live in, to improve our lives, and to build a future that's clean, safe and sustainable.

A single bright star in the constellation of Indus, visible from the southern hemisphere, has revealed new insights on an ancient collision that our galaxy the Milky Way underwent with another smaller galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus early in its history. An international team of scientists led by the University of Birmingham adopted the novel approach of applying the forensic characterisation of a single ancient, bright star called ν Indi as a probe of the history of the Milky Way.

Artificial intelligence is classifying real supernova explosions without the traditional use of spectra, thanks to a team of astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. The complete data sets and resulting classifications are publicly available for open use. By training a machine learning model to categorize supernovae based on their visible characteristics, the astronomers were able to classify real data from the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey for 2,315 supernovae with an accuracy rate of 82-percent without the use of spectra.

The mystery surrounding the whereabouts of a supermassive black hole has deepened. Despite searching with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have no evidence that a distant black hole estimated to weigh between 3 billion and 100 billion times the mass of the sun is anywhere to be found.

At Caltech, as throughout the rest of the world, 2020 was a year like no other. This unprecedented year was filled with personal and professional challenges as well as fast-breaking and paradigm-shifting events, all of which were framed by (and helped to shape) incredible advances and discoveries in science, engineering, and technology, realized thanks to the ingenuity, insight, and perseverance of Caltech's community of researchers and scholars, students and staff.

An international research team led by the University of Bern has discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting around each other from a very large distance. Although these objects look like giant exoplanets, they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems deprived of a Sun.

Scientists have calculated the mass range for Dark Matter - and it's tighter than the science world thought. Their findings - due to be published in Physical Letters B in March - radically narrow the range of potential masses for Dark Matter particles, and help to focus the search for future Dark Matter-hunters.

Two Sussex students are among scientists from across the world to have catalogued almost 700 million new astronomical objects in the Dark Energy Survey, which is the most detailed survey ever taken of the dark sky. Astronomical objects include stars, planets, moons, asteroids and comets. Post-graduate researchers Reese Wilkinson and David Turner joined Professor Kathy Romer at the Cerro Tololo observatory on a mountain in Chile to take part in the survey.

Artist's impression of the exoplanet HD 106906 b located a great distance away from the central binary star and the disk of dusty material that surrounds it (Image courtesy of ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser). Astronomers are still searching for a hypothetical "Planet Nine" in the distant reaches of our solar system, but an exoplanet 336 light years from Earth is looking more and more like the Planet Nine of its star system.

High-precision measurements of the strong interaction between stable and unstable particles The positively charged protons in atomic nuclei should actually repel each other, and yet even heavy nuclei with many protons and neutrons stick together. The so-called strong interaction is responsible for this.

Humans have taken spiders into space more than once to study the importance of gravity to their web-building. What originally began as a somewhat unsuccessful PR experiment for high school students has yielded the surprising insight that light plays a larger role in arachnid orientation than previously thought.

Orbiting instrument hints at how stored magnetic energy heats solar atmosphere A phenomenon first detected in the solar wind may help solve a long-standing mystery about the sun: why the solar atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than the surface. Images from the Earth-orbiting Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph , aka IRIS, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly , aka AIA, show evidence that low-lying magnetic loops are heated to millions of degrees Kelvin.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab have contributed much to the field since the Dec. 4, 1930, letter that theorized this particle's existence They come in three flavors and can transform among these different types as they travel. They pass through most matter undetected and uninterrupted. Tens of trillions of them are passing through your body in the time it takes to read this sentence.

A Japanese space mission will deliver samples collected from asteroid Ryugu in a capsule to the outback desert of Woomera in South Australia this Sunday morning. A leading expert from The Australian National University (ANU) who will analyse the samples says they could provide major insights into the origin of life on Earth.

Stars are rather patient. They can live for billions of years, and they typically make slow transitions - sometimes over many millions of years - between the different stages of their lives. So when a previously typical star's behavior rapidly changes in a few decades, astronomers take note and get to work.

An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, announced the most detailed ever catalogue of the stars in a huge swathe of our Milky Way galaxy.

Scientists from Cardiff University have helped produce a brand-new, three-dimensional survey of our galaxy, allowing them to peer into the inner structure and observe its star-forming processes in unprecedented detail. The large-scale survey, called SEDIGISM (Structure, Excitation and Dynamics of the Inner Galactic Interstellar Medium), has revealed a wide range of structures within the Milky Way, from individual star-forming clumps to giant molecular clouds and complexes, that will allow astronomers to start pushing the boundaries of what we know about the structure of our galaxy.

Martian geologist Kirsten Siebach among 13 chosen by NASA for rover mission Kirsten Siebach has to persevere a little longer, waiting for her ship to come in. That ship is in space , carrying a rover called Perseverance to Mars. And Siebach, a Martian geologist at Rice University, is now one of 13 scientists recently selected by NASA to help operate the rover and scout for samples that will eventually be returned to Earth.