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Astronomy / Space Science - Environment - 29.07.2021

Small force, big effect: How the planets could influence the sun
A new theory supports the controversial hypothesis that the planets affect solar activity. It puts forward a mechanism by which the very small influence of the planets could exert its rhythm on such a large system as the Sun. If the theory is confirmed, it could possibly be used to predict solar activity more accurately.

Astronomy / Space Science - 29.07.2021

New Spin on Planet Formation Mysteries
Astronomers have captured the first-ever spin measurements of planets making up the HR 8799 star system. Discovered in 2008 by the W. M. Keck Observatory and Gemini Observatory, which are both located in Hawaii, the HR 8799 star system is located 129 light-years away and has four so-called super-Jupiter planets, each more massive than Jupiter.

Astronomy / Space Science - 29.07.2021

Catching a cosmic boomerang in action
For the first time, astronomers have observed a cosmic boomerang effect - streams of heavy, molecular gas that are stripped away from a distant galaxy only to circle back and return later. Astronomers at Yale and Arizona State University led the research team that made the discovery, which had been theorized in simulations but not observed in detail.

Astronomy / Space Science - Physics - 27.07.2021

On the hunt for ’hierarchical’ black holes
Black holes, detected by their gravitational wave signal as they collide with other black holes, could be the product of much earlier parent collisions. Such an event has only been hinted at so far, but scientists at the University of Birmingham in the UK, and Northwestern University in the US, believe we are getting close to tracking down the first of these so-called 'hierarchical' black holes.

Astronomy / Space Science - Physics - 26.07.2021

Planets form in binary systems without getting crushed
Astronomers have developed the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems. Planet formation in binary systems is more complicated, because the companion star acts like a giant eggbeater, dynamically exciting the protoplanetary disc Roman Rafikov The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics, have shown how exoplanets in binary star systems - such as the 'Tatooine' planets spotted by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope - came into being without being destroyed in their chaotic birth environment.

Physics - Astronomy / Space Science - 26.07.2021

On eternal imbalance
Some physical systems, especially in the quantum world, do not reach a stable equilibrium even after a long time. An ETH researcher has now found an elegant explanation for this phenomenon. If you put a bottle of beer in a big bathtub full of ice-cold water, it won't be long before you can enjoy a cold beer.

Astronomy / Space Science - Earth Sciences - 22.07.2021

InSight Mission: Mars unveiled
Using information obtained from around a dozen earthquakes detected on Mars by the Very Broad Band SEIS seismometer, developed in France, the international team of NASA's InSight mission has unveiled the internal structure of Mars.

Astronomy / Space Science - Earth Sciences - 22.07.2021

The anatomy of a planet
Researchers at ETH Zurich working together with an international team have been able to use seismic data to look inside Mars for the first time. They measured the crust, mantle and core and narrowed down their composition. The three resulting articles are being published together as a cover story in the journal Science .

Astronomy / Space Science - Earth Sciences - 22.07.2021

Advancing to the core thanks to marsquakes
Researchers at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich have been able to use seismic data to look inside Mars for the first time. Marsquakes recorded by NASA's InSight lander provided information about the structure of the planet's crust, mantle and core. We know that Earth is made up of layers: a thin crust of light, solid rock surrounds a thick mantle of heavy, viscous rock, which in turn envelopes a core consisting mainly of iron and nickel.

Astronomy / Space Science - Physics - 21.07.2021

Long-period oscillations of the Sun discovered
Ten years of data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory combined with numerical models reveal the deep low musical notes of the Sun   (mps) A team of solar physicists led by Professor Laurent Gizon of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) and the University of Göttingen in Germany has reported the discovery of global oscillations of the Sun with very long periods, comparable to the 27-day solar rotation period.

Astronomy / Space Science - 20.07.2021

Xenon Researchers Unite to Build Next-generation Dark Matter Detector
The two major competing experiments, XENON/DARWIN at Gran Sasso in Italiy and LUX-ZEPLIN in the US, have now joined forces to work together on a new, single, multi-tonne scale xenon observatory to explore dark matter. The detector will be highly sensitive to a wide range of proposed dark matter particles and their interactions with visible matter.

Astronomy / Space Science - Physics - 13.07.2021

Galactic gamma ray bursts predicted last year show up on schedule
An artist's depiction of a hiccup in the magnetic field of a magnetar - a highly magnetized neutron star - that produces a powerful gamma ray burst visible from across the galaxy. UC Berkeley physicists have found an unusual pattern to these bursts that could help pin down the precise mechanism triggering the hiccups and generating the soft gamma bursts.

Astronomy / Space Science - Physics - 09.07.2021

Scientists solve 40-year mystery over Jupiter’s X-ray aurora
A research team co-led by UCL has solved a decades-old mystery as to how Jupiter produces a spectacular burst of X-rays every few minutes. The X-rays are part of Jupiter's aurora - bursts of visible and invisible light that occur when charged particles interact with the planet's atmosphere. A similar phenomenon occurs on Earth, creating the northern lights, but Jupiter's is much more powerful, releasing hundreds of gigawatts of energy, enough to briefly power all of human civilisation*.

Astronomy / Space Science - Physics - 09.07.2021

New Type of Stellar Grain Discovered
Unusual chemistry of grain could tell scientists more about the origin of Earth's water Scientists have discovered a new type of star dust whose composition indicates that it formed during a rare form of nucleosynthesis (the process through which new atomic nuclei are created) and could shed new light on the history of water on Earth.

Astronomy / Space Science - Physics - 08.07.2021

Ancient star death unlocks 13-billion-year space mystery
In a world-first, astronomers from The Australian National University (ANU) have discovered evidence of a massive explosion that led to the destruction of a rapidly spinning, strongly-magnetized star.   The so-called "magneto-rotational hypernova" occurred around a billion years after the Big Bang and was 10-times more energetic than a supernova.    The breakthrough discovery, led by an international team of scientists, offers clues for why an unusually high concentration of metal elements were present in another ancient Milky Way star.

Computer Science - Astronomy / Space Science - 07.07.2021

Scientists use artificial intelligence to detect gravitational waves
Argonne, UChicago researchers create method to dramatically reduce data processing time for LIGO detections When gravitational waves were first detected in 2015 by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), they sent a ripple through the scientific community, as they confirmed another of Einstein's theories and marked the birth of gravitational wave astronomy.

Astronomy / Space Science - 06.07.2021

Kepler telescope glimpses a free-floating planet population
Tantalising evidence has been uncovered for a mysterious population of 'free-floating' planets which may be alone in deep space, unbound to any host star. The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .

Astronomy / Space Science - 05.07.2021

Gang of black holes spotted at centre of star cluster
Scientists have been left stunned by a gang of more than 100 black holes sitting at the centre of a large collection of stars over 80,000 light years from Earth. The finding has been made inside Palomar 5, a 10-billion-year-old collection of stars that orbits around the Milky Way. Reporting their findings today in Nature Astronomy, the scientists say Palomar 5 contains about three times as many black holes as they would expect to find in a star cluster of this size, with each black hole having a mass of about 20 times that of the Sun.

Astronomy / Space Science - 01.07.2021

Oversized black hole population in the star cluster Palomar 5
Palomar 5 is a unique star cluster. This is firstly because it is one of the "fluffiest" clusters in the halo of our Galaxy, with the average distance between the stars being a few light-years, comparable to the distance from the Sun to the nearest star. Secondly, it has a specular stellar stream associated with it that spans more than 20 degrees across the sky.

Astronomy / Space Science - 30.06.2021

’There may not be a conflict after all’ in expanding universe debate
New analysis by UChicago astronomer finds agreement with standard model in ongoing Hubble tension Our universe is expanding, but our two main ways to measure how fast this expansion is happening have resulted in different answers. For the past decade, astrophysicists have been gradually dividing into two camps: one that believes that the difference is significant, and another that thinks it could be due to errors in measurement.