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Black holes may be the engines driving the universe’s dark energy

Researchers at Durham and collaborators in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) mission have proposed a bold new theory that black holes could be converting matter into dark energy.

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SpaceX to launch secret X-37B space plane Thursday

The U.S. Department of Defense’s mini-shuttle heads to orbit once again Thursday night.

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Close-up images reveal asteroid debris plume after DART impact

On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million miles away.

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What happened before the Big Bang? Computational method may provide answers

We’re often told it is “unscientific” or “meaningless” to ask what happened before the Big Bang. But a new paper by FQxI cosmologist Eugene Lim, of King’s College London, UK, and astrophysicists Katy Clough, of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Josu Aurrekoetxea, at Oxford University, UK, published in Living Reviews in Relativity, proposes […]

Spacecraft design gets a boost with new origami flower-like patterns

The ancient Japanese art of paper-folding, or origami, is already inspiring the design of the next generation of space vehicles, but now there’s a new family of origami shapes that could make them even more compact and reliable.

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Analysis suggests the most likely places to detect signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence

If an extraterrestrial intelligence were looking for signs of human communications, when and where should they look? In a new study, researchers at Penn State and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California analyzed when and where human deep space transmissions would be most detectable by an observer outside our solar system and suggest that […]

XRISM reveals slow-moving hot gas near black hole during faint X-ray phase

An international research team has reported remarkable findings from an XRISM observation of the black hole X-ray binary 4U 1630–472, located in our galaxy. XRISM is an X-ray astronomy satellite developed by Japan in collaboration with the United States and Europe and was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center on September 7, 2023.

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Astronomers combine X-ray and radio data to map pulsar ‘hand’ nebula

In 2009, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released a captivating image: a pulsar and its surrounding nebula that is shaped like a hand. Since then, astronomers have used Chandra and other telescopes to continue to observe this object. Now, new radio data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) has been combined with Chandra’s X-ray data […]

Ceres may have had long-standing energy to fuel habitability

New NASA research has found that Ceres may have had a lasting source of chemical energy: the right types of molecules needed to fuel some microbial metabolisms. Although there is no evidence that microorganisms ever existed on Ceres, the finding supports theories that this intriguing dwarf planet, which is the largest body in the main […]

Streams of gas might lead to the rapid formation of high-mass stars

The size of our universe and the bodies within it is incomprehensible to us lowly humans. The sun has a mass that is more than 330,000 times that of our Earth, and yet there are stars in the universe that completely dwarf our sun.

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The most powerful tool in an astronomer’s arsenal is a lens—but not the kind you might think

Astronomers are living in a golden age of bigger and better telescopes. But even our most advanced technology pales in comparison to the power of nature’s own “cosmic magnifying glasses”—strong gravitational lenses.

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We’ve been sending animals into space for 7 decades—yet there are still no rules to protect them from harm

This week, Russia is expected to launch its Bion-M No.2 biosatellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying 75 mice and 1,500 fruit flies.

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Watching how stars come into being using cosmic simulations

Pictures are the key to new insights in the field of astrophysics. Such images include simulations of cosmic events, which astrophysicists at UZH use to investigate how stars, planets and galaxies came into existence.

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Accidental double zoom reveals millimeter waves around supermassive black hole

An international team of astronomers led by Matus Rybak (Leiden University, Netherlands) has proven, thanks to accidental double zoom, that millimeter radiation is generated close to the core of a supermassive black hole. Their findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and are available on the arXiv preprint server.

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Tidal forces and orbital evolution of habitable zone planets investigated

How do tidal forces determine a planet’s orbital evolution, specifically planets in the habitable zone? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how tidal forces far more powerful than experienced on Earth could influence orbital evolution of habitable zone planets with highly eccentric orbits around […]