Category Astronomy/Space

Researchers have built the world’s first physics-based computer simulation of oxygen transport on Europa, finding that it’s possible for oxygen to drain through the moon’s icy shell and into its ocean of liquid water — where it could potentially help sustain alien life — by hitching a ride on salt water under the moon’s ‘chaos terrains.’ The results show that not only is the transport possible, but that the amount of oxygen brought into Europa’s ocean could be on a par with the quantity of oxygen in Earth’s oceans today.

This theory has been proposed by others, but the researchers put it to the test by building the world’s first physics-based computer s...

Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have shown that a part of the Milky Way known as the ‘thick disc’ began forming 13 billion years ago, around 2 billion years earlier than expected, and just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

This surprising result comes from an analysis performed by Maosheng Xiang and Hans-Walter Rix, from the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany. They took brightness and positional data from Gaia’s Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) dataset and combined it with measurements of the stars’ chemical compositions, as given by data from China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) for roughly 250 000 stars to derive their ages.

They chose to look at sub giant stars...

Astronomers identified a nearby star whose sunspot cycles appear to have stopped. Studying this star might help explain the unusual period from the mid 1600s to the early 1700s when our Sun paused its sunspot cycles.

The number of sunspots on our Sun typically ebbs and flows in a predictable 11-year cycle, but one unusual 70-year period when sunspots were incredibly rare has mystified s...

Solar prominences are large magnetic structures confining a cool and dense plasma in the hot solar corona. Typically, the prominence plasma is 100 times cooler and denser than its coronal surroundings. This phenomenon raises some important questions about the origin of the prominence plasma, and the energy and force equilibria which allow it to remain in the corona for a relatively long time.

The prominence contains many fine structures, including prominence bubble and dark upflow plumes. However, the nature of prominence bubbles remains controversial and the detailed formation mechanism of dark upflow plumes is not clear.

A research team led by Dr. Wang Jincheng, Prof...