Category Astronomy/Space

The moon is almost completely covered in dust. Unlike on Earth, this dust is not smoothed by wind and weather, but is sharp-edged and also electrostatically charged. This dust has been studied since the Apollo era at the end of the 1960s. Now, an international research team led by Dr. Ottaviano Rüsch from the University of Münster has for the first time discovered anomalous meter-sized rocks on the lunar surface that are covered in dust and presumably exhibit unique properties—such as magnetic anomalies.

The scientists’ most important finding is that only very few boulders on the moon have a layer of dust with very special reflective proper...

Metalenses have been used to image microscopic features of tissue and resolve details smaller than a wavelength of light. Now they are going bigger.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens that can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution.

It is the first all-glass, large-scale metalens in the visible wavelength that can be mass produced using conventional CMOS fabrication technology.

The research is published in ACS Nano.

“The ability to accurately control the size of tens of billions of nanopill...

Researchers have discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, dating from the dawn of the universe, and found that it is ‘eating’ its host galaxy to death.

The international team, led by the University of Cambridge, used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect the black hole, which dates from 400 million years after the big bang, more than 13 billion years ago. The results, which lead author Professor Roberto Maiolino says are “a giant leap forward,” are reported in the journal Nature.

That this surprisingly massive black hole — a few million times the mass of our Sun — even exists so early in the universe challenges our assumptions about how black holes form and grow...

Columbia researchers analyzing images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found that galaxies in the early universe are often flat and elongated, like breadsticks—and are rarely round, like balls of pizza dough.

“Roughly 50 to 80% of the galaxies we studied appear to be flattened in two dimensions,” explained Viraj Pandya, a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University and the lead author of a new paper slated to appear in The Astrophysical Journal that outlines the findings...