Category Astronomy/Space

Peeking out from behind the glare of a bright foreground star, astronomers have uncovered the most extraordinary example yet of a nearby galaxy with characteristics that are more like galaxies in the distant, early universe...

Studying an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft inside the orbit of Mercury and very near to the Sun might be the trick to uncovering the nature of dark matter, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy.

Dark matter makes up more than 80 per cent of mass in the universe, but it has so far evaded detection on Earth, despite decades of experimental efforts. A key component of these searches is an assumption about the local density of dark matter, which determines the number of dark matter particles passing through the detector at any given time, and therefore the experimental sensitivity...

Orbital observations unveil the presence of an enormous mantle plume pushing the surface of Mars upward and driving intense volcanic and seismic activity. On Earth, shifting tectonic plates reshuffle the planet’s surface and make for a dynamic interior, so the absence of such processes on Mars led many to think of it as a dead planet, where not much happened in the past 3 billion years.

In the current issue of Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge current views of Martian geodynamic evolution with a report on the discover...

A Martian megatsunami may have been caused by an asteroid collision similar to the Chicxulub impact—which contributed to the mass extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs on Earth 66 million years ago—in a shallow ocean region, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

Previous research has proposed that an asteroid or comet impact within an ocean in the Martian northern lowlands may have caused a megatsunami approximately 3.4 billion years ago. However, prior to this study the location of the resulting impact crater was unclear.

Alexis Rodriguez and colleagues analyzed maps of Mars’ surface, created by combining images from previous missions to the planet, and identified an impact crater that could have caused the megatsunami...