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Mercury was long considered the exception to the rule that magnetic planets have radiation belts similar to Earth’s Van Allen belts, but a new study by University of Michigan Engineering and the University of California, Berkeley, suggests otherwise—Mercury occasionally has such a layer of radiation in its magnetic field.
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“Dead stars” known as white dwarfs have already shown the potential to help us better understand how planetary systems, including our own solar system, take shape and evolve. Now, research from the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that potential could be even greater than anticipated.
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The expansive red bluffs of Western Australia’s Yilgarn Craton give the landscape a Martian appearance. It turns out the resemblance is more than superficial: The Yilgarn Craton also shares geological characteristics with lakes in Mars’ Terra Sirenum region. T. A. Plattner and colleagues recently characterized those shared features to shed light on the region’s aqueous […]
Quasars, distant cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, are among the most luminous objects in the universe. While not uncommon, their brightness can make it difficult to accurately measure the galaxies they reside in. This means scientists must use gravitational lensing to assist in analyzing these bright objects, a method that relies on […]
A team of astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has observed an extremely rare “wandering” black hole located tens of thousands of light-years from the center of its galaxy. This finding could reshape scientists’ understanding of how massive black holes move through the universe after galaxies collide. The findings are published […]
Positrons—the antimatter counterpart of electrons—are created in high-energy cosmic processes. When normal matter meets its antimatter counterpart, they annihilate, or vanish, and produce a distinctive 511 keV gamma-ray signal. Scientists use this signal to detect where these annihilations occur.
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SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket deployed operational next-generation Starlink satellites for the first time during its 13th flight test, which addressed snags that arose in the previous test.
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Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields, allowing us to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity to an extent impossible with small objects. But we are also reaching the limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So, various authors […]
Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has so far primarily meant focusing on one particular type of signal—and that signal has normally been based on our own current cutting-edge technology. But what if that’s the wrong way to look for signs of alien intelligence? What if a resource-conscious civilization decided it was too complicated to send femtosecond […]
One of the challenges of searching for technosignatures (i.e., signs that intelligent life somewhere in the universe has created technology) is understanding what to look for. Technology is a very broad area, and different types would show up as different features. One of the most commonly cited is a Dyson sphere, which attempts to encapsulate […]
A U.S.-Russian space crew landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Sunday after an eight-month stint on the International Space Station.
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By analyzing the data from NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, Chinese astronomers have investigated a recently identified millisecond pulsar known as PSR J0435+3233. As a result, they found that the pulsar exhibits gamma-ray pulsations. The discovery was detailed in a paper published July 17 on the pre-print server arXiv.
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SpaceX’s mammoth Starship rocket blasted off Friday on another test flight stretching halfway around the world, this time releasing 20 of the most advanced Starlinks.
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Chinese astronomers report the detection of a peculiar optical transient event that occurred in the center of a dwarf galaxy. The newly discovered event, designated AT2019ijn, is a fast-rising, slow-decaying blue optical transient with exceptionally bright radio emission. The finding was detailed in a paper published July 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Ancient samples from the moon’s far side are helping scientists uncover how asteroid impacts shaped the early solar system. The findings challenge decades of thinking about when those impacts occurred and offer new insights into the conditions that influenced Earth’s evolution.
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