Category Astronomy/Space

Analysis offers new means to predict ‘cosmological signatures’ for models of dark matter. A team of physicists has developed a method for predicting the composition of dark matter – invisible matter detected only by its gravitational pull on ordinary matter and whose discovery has been long sought by scientists.

Its work, which appears in the journal Physical Review Letters, centers on predicting “cosmological signatures” for models of dark matter with a mass between that of the electron and the proton...

Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have discovered the fastest known star, which travels around a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits SagittariusA*, the black hole in the centre of our Milky Way, in four years and reaches a speed of around 8000 kilometres per second. S4716 comes as close as 100 AU (astronomical unit) to the black hole — a small distance by astronomical standards. One AU corresponds to 149,597,870 kilometres. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

In the vicinity of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy is a densely packed cluster of stars. This cluster, called S cluster, is home to well over a hundred stars that differ in their brightness and mass...

Researchers have for the first time identified an unexpected richness of complex organic molecules on a comet. This was achieved thanks to the analysis of data collected during ESA’s Rosetta mission at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, also known as Chury. Delivered to the early Earth by impacting comets, these organics may have helped to kick-start carbon-based life as we know it.

Comets are fossils from the ancient times and from the dept...

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test against potential asteroid impacts on Earth. Researchers of the University of Bern and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS now show that instead of leaving behind a relatively small crater, the impact of the DART spacecraft on its target could leave the asteroid near unrecognizable.

66 million years ago, a giant asteroid impact on the Earth likely caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Currently no known asteroid poses an immediate threat...