Category Astronomy/Space

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and partners at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) have made the first-ever detection of gas in an circumplanetary disk. What’s more, the detection also suggests the presence of a very young exoplanet. The results of the research are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Circumplanetary disks are an a...

Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don’t know why. This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern life.

Over the past few decades, Earth’s rotation around its axis—which determines how long a day is—has been speeding up. This trend has been making our days shorter; in fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half-century or so.

But despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdown—days are getting longer again, and the reason is so far a mystery.

While the clocks in our phones indicate there are e...

When humans, animals, and machines move throughout the world, they always push against something, whether it’s the ground, air, or water. Until recently, physicists believed this to be a constant, following the law of conservation momentum. Now, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have proven the opposite — when bodies exist in curved spaces, it turns out that they can in fact move without pushing against something.

The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 28, 2022...

According to the standard model of cosmology, the vast majority of galaxies are surrounded by a halo of dark matter particles. This halo is invisible, but its mass exerts a strong gravitational pull on galaxies in the vicinity. A new study challenges this view of the Universe. The results suggest that the dwarf galaxies of Earth’s second closest galaxy cluster — known as the Fornax Cluster — are free of such dark matter halos.

Dwarf galaxies are small, faint galaxies that can usually be found in galaxy clusters or near larger galaxies...