Category Astronomy/Space

At the heart of planets, extreme states are to be found: temperatures of thousands of degrees, pressures a million times greater than atmospheric pressure. They can therefore only be explored directly to a limited extent — which is why the expert community is trying to use sophisticated experiments to recreate equivalent extreme conditions...

Considered an ultra-hot Jupiter – a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain — the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.

An international team, led by scientists at Cornell University, University of Toronto and Queen’s University Belfast, reports the discovery of ionized calcium on the planet – suggesting an atmospheric temperature higher than previously thought, or strong upper atmosphere winds.

The discovery was made in high-resolution spectra obtained with Gemini North near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Hot Jupiters are named for their h...

New research into metal-rich asteroids reveals information about the origins and compositions of these rare bodies that could one day be mined. Metal-rich near-Earth asteroids, or NEAs, are rare, but their presence provides the intriguing possibility that iron, nickel and cobalt could someday be mined for use on Earth or in Space.

New research, published in the Planetary Science Journal, investigated two metal-rich asteroids in our own cosmic backyard to learn more about their origins, compositions and relationships with meteorites found on Earth.

These me...

Astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of CAS and Nanjing University have revealed the wobbly and flared nature of the Milky Way disk based on LAMOST-Gaia data, which updates our understanding about the galaxy.

The results were published in the Astronomical Journal.

The Milky Way is a typical disk galaxy. In the classical view of the Milky Way, the disk is symmetric and flat on the whole, like a pancake. Stars in the disk rotate around the galactic center, with mean radial and vertical velocities to be zero.

With the help of huge observational data provided by large survey projects in recent years, more and more details hidden in the Milky Way disk have become appar...