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Silicon carbide (SiC) dust is one of the most important ingredients in cosmic dust, the tiny particles floating throughout the cosmos that eventually give rise to new planets and stars. This compound of silicon and carbon is forged in the atmospheres of dying stars, especially carbon-rich ones, but exactly how has long remained a mystery. […]
Nasa is developing ways to use nuclear power to send spacecraft to their destinations. Nuclear propulsion could greatly reduce the journey time to Mars, perhaps cutting a voyage of more than six months to three or four months.
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You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. […]
When you think of outer space, you’re likely picturing stars, planets and moons. But much of space is filled with clouds of gas, plasma and stardust—known as interstellar clouds.
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Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, is also the solar system’s largest satellite, even larger than the planet Mercury. It is also the only celestial body aside from Earth (and the gas giants) to have an intrinsic magnetic field. As if this didn’t make the icy body interesting enough, scientists also predict that it has a massive […]
Gravitational wave researchers working on the world’s most sensitive scientific instruments have found a way to tune their detectors using a process akin to the pitch-correction used in music production.
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If you’ve ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you’ve probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a “cheat sheet” for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and […]
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover recently took a self-portrait against a sweeping backdrop of ancient Martian terrain at a location the science team calls Lac de Charmes. Assembled from 61 individual images, the selfie shows Perseverance training its mast on a rocky outcrop on which it had just made a circular abrasion patch, with the western […]
The galaxy cluster Abell 2029 is sometimes described as “the most relaxed cluster in the universe.” This moniker does not arise from some sort of mellow vibe, but rather because of how calm and undisturbed the superheated gas that pervades the cluster appears to be.
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Cornell astronomers are deploying a new instrument that grants them, for the first time, a better view of the universe’s earliest galaxies, which can’t be observed individually with traditional ground- or space-based telescopes.
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Dark matter is thought to make up most of the matter in the universe, but the only way it interacts with its surroundings is through gravity. If two colliding black holes spiral through a dense region of dark matter and merge, gravitational waves rippling across space and time could carry an imprint of that dark […]
A new AI-based approach that can “hear” inside the sun could give vital signs of the solar disturbances that have significant effects in near-Earth space and on human activities. The solar cycle is an approximate 11-year period during which the sun’s magnetic activity rises and falls. The cycle begins relatively calmly. However, as it progresses, […]
By analyzing the data from the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT), an international team of astronomers has discovered optical quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) in a bright quasar known as 3C 454.3. It is so far one of the most persistent QPOs detected in the optical band. The finding was reported in a paper published April 30 […]
Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made, tracing the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.
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The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there’s a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet that will have a huge impact on its habitability is its size. A new paper, […]
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