Category Astronomy/Space

This view combines information from two instruments on a NASA Mars orbiter to map color-coded composition over the shape of the ground within the Nili Fossae plains region of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/Univ. of Arizona

How did Mars change from a world with water billions of years ago to the arid Red Planet of today. A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its CO2 by the era of valley network formation.

Carbon dioxide makes up most of the Martian atmosphere. That gas can be pulled out of the air and sequestered or pulled into the ground by chemical reactions with rocks to form carbonate minerals...

A simulation of a lead ion collision in ALICE. Credit: CERN

CERN: Most precise measurement of mass and charge of Light Nuclei and Snti-Nuclei. Why did anti-matter disappear almost completely from our universe, whereas matter did not? Scientists are attempting to solve this mystery at the European research institute at CERN. Now they published the most precise measurement of the properties of light atomic nuclei and anti-nuclei ever made.

At the LHC, researchers let lead nuclei and protons collide at the highest beam energies to date. The temperatures created are 100,000X higher than those in the center of the Sun. “A state is created that is very similar to the one after the Big Bang,” explains Prof Laura Fabbietti...

The rich patchwork of gas clouds in this new image make up part of a huge stellar nursery nicknamed the Prawn Nebula (also known as Gum 56 and IC 4628). Taken using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, this may well be one of the best pictures ever taken of this object. It shows clumps of hot new-born stars nestled in among the clouds that make up the nebula. Credit: ESO

Deeply immersed in this huge stellar nursery are 3 clusters of hot young stars – only a few million years old – which glow brightly in UV light. It is the light from these stars that causes the nebula’s gas clouds to glow. The radiation strips electrons from atoms ie ionisation, – and when they recombine they release energy in the form of light...

Results of the analyses by individual experiments (coloured) and both experiments together (black), showing the improvement in precision resulting from the combination of results. Read more at:

3 years after the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations present for the first time combined measurements of many of its properties, at the third annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP 2015). By combining their analyses of the data collected in 2011 and 2012, ATLAS and CMS draw the sharpest picture yet of this novel boson. The new results provide in particular the best precision on its production and decay and on how it interacts with other particles...