Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers have managed to link the properties of the inner planets of our solar system with our cosmic history: with the emergence of ring structures in the swirling disk of gas and dust in which these planets were formed...

The three-body problem is one of the oldest problems in physics: It concerns the motions of systems of three bodies—like the sun, Earth, and the moon—and how their orbits change and evolve due to their mutual gravity. The three-body problem has been a focus of scientific inquiry ever since Newton.

When one massive object comes close to another, their relative motion follows a trajectory dictated by their mutual gravitational attraction, but as they move along and change their positions along their trajectories, the forces between them, which depend on their mutual positions, also change, which, in turn, affects their trajectory. For two bodies (e.g...

An international scientific group with outstanding Valencian participation has managed to measure for the first time oscillations in the brightness of a magnetar during its most violent moments. In just a 10th of a second, the magnetar released energy equivalent to that produced by the sun in 100,000 years. The observation was carried out without human intervention, thanks to an artificial intelligence system developed at the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) of the University of Valencia.

Among neutron stars, objects that can contain a half-million times the mass of the Earth in a diameter of about 20 kilometers, are magnetars, a small group with the most intense magnetic fields known...

Results to provide data for NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission. An asteroid impact can be enough to ruin anyone’s day, but several small factors can make the difference between an out-of-this-world story and total annihilation. In)l AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing, a researcher from the National Institute of Natural Hazards in China developed a computer simulation of asteroid collisions to better understand these factors.NASA’s Psyche mission aims to be the first spacecraft to explore an asteroid made entirely of metal. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

The computer simulation initially sought to replicate model asteroid strikes performed in a laboratory...