Scientists recently identified the oldest material on Earth: stardust that’s 7 billion years old, tucked away in a massive, rocky meteorite that struck our planet half a century ago. This ancient interstellar dust, made of presolar grains (dust grains that predate our sun), was belched […]
Astronomers have detected several supermassive black holes wandering through their dwarf host galaxies, providing new clues about how similar black holes evolved in the early universe. Using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, the researchers identified 13 dwarf […]
Proxima b may not be an only child after all. In August 2016, astronomers announced that a roughly Earth-size exoplanet circles the closest star to the sun, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, which lies a mere 4.2 light-years from us. (For perspective, the Milky Way galaxy’s spiral disk is […]
It’s the award no one wanted to win: 2019 was the second hottest year on record, government scientists confirmed. That’s according to two separate analyses: one conducted by NASA and one by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Each study compared 2019 Earth temperature data with scientists’ historical […]
Scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo collaborations have announced the detection of a second pair of neutron stars that went bump in the night. The announcement was made at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu and the results […]
Interestingly, the star TOI 700 appears to be relatively quiet compared to other small stars. Red dwarf stars are known for their roiling magnetic activity and outbursts of radiation, which could be harmful to life as we know it and might even strip a planet […]
Up to seven eclipses of the Sun and Moon can take place in one year, though the last time that happened was 1982, and the fewest possible is four. The mix of six events occurring in 2020 is especially interesting: The two solar eclipses will […]
Australian Aboriginal lore is replete with references to birds carrying fire, and some traditional ceremonies even depict the behaviour. Now ornithologists have collected accounts from witnesses across the savannas of Australia’s far north, known as the Top End, suggesting three Australian birds of prey species […]
The discovery of a cavity with an area equivalent to two-thirds of Manhattan beneath an Antarctic glacier has raised urgent concerns about the speed of ice-melt in the polar regions. The cavity, which is almost 300 metres tall, was revealed in data gathered by NASA’s […]
Glaciologists have released the most accurate portrait yet of the contours of the land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet. As part of the BedMachine Antarctica project, a team led by the University of California, Irvine, US, constructed a detailed map using ice thickness data from 19 […]