Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers have developed a new code to simulate the formation of a cluster of baby stars. Comparison with the well-known real case of the Orion Nebula shows that its off-center bubble of ionized gas was caused by a massive star that was pushed out of the newborn cluster but is now falling back in.

Groups of stars often form together in clouds of cold hydrogen gas. The brightest and most massive stars ionize the surrounding gas, making it too hot to form new stars. In this way massive stars act as a feedback, shutting off new star formation...

A new study offers direct evidence showing where near-light speed particle acceleration occurs inside the largest explosion known in the solar system, the solar flare.

Solar flares are among the most violent explosions in our solar system, but despite their immense energy — equivalent to a hundred billion atomic bombs detonating at once — physicists still haven’t been able to answer exactly how these sudden eruptions on the Sun are able to launch particles to Earth, nearly 93 million miles away, in under an hour.

Now, in a study published June 8 in Na...

A new study shows a deep connection between some of the largest, most energetic events in the universe and much smaller, weaker ones powered by our own Sun.

The results come from a long observation with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory of Abell 2146, a pair of colliding galaxy clusters located about 2.8 billion light-years from Earth. The new study was led by Helen Russell from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham.

Galaxy clusters contain hundreds of galaxies and huge amounts of hot gas and dark matter and are among the largest structures in the universe...

Research team studies kombucha cultures under simulated extraterrestrial conditions. An international research team including the University of Göttingen has investigated the chances of survival of kombucha cultures under Mars-like conditions. Kombucha is known as a drink, sometimes called tea fungus or mushroom tea, which is produced by fermenting sugared tea using kombucha cultures – a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. Although the simulated Martian environment destroyed the microbial ecology of the kombucha cultures, surprisingly, a cellulose-producing bacterial species survived. The results were published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

The scientists of the “Biology and Mars Experiment” (BIOMEX) project had already sent kombucha cultures to the International Space Statio...