Category Astronomy/Space

In a first study of its kind, scientists characterized different bacterial populations isolated over time from potable (drinking) water from the International Space Station (ISS).

By all appearances, the universe beyond Earth is a vast, lonely, and sterile space. Yet, wherever humans may travel, an abundance of microbial life will follow.

In a first study of its kind, lead author Jiseon Yang at th...

In order to better understand the history and evolution of the Milky Way, astronomers are studying the composition of the gases and metals that make up an important part of our galaxy. Three main elements stand out: the initial gas coming from outside our galaxy, the gas between the stars inside our galaxy—enriched with chemical elements –, and the dust created by the condensation of the metals present in this gas.

Until now, theoretical models assumed that these three elements were homogeneously mixed throughout the Milky Way and reached a level of chemical e...

Could dying stars hold the secret to looking younger? New evidence suggests that white dwarfs could continue to burn hydrogen in the final stages of their lives, causing them to appear more youthful than they actually are. This discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of star clusters.

The prevalent view of white dwarfs as inert, slowly cooling stars has been challenged by observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. An international group of astronomers have discovered the first evidence that white dwarfs can slow down their rate of ageing by burning hydrogen on their surface.

“We have found the first observational evidence that white dwarfs can still undergo stable thermonuclear activity,” explained Jianxing Chen of the Alma Mater Studio...

As their name suggests, ultradiffuse galaxies, or UDGs, are dwarf galaxies whose stars are spread out over a vast region, resulting in extremely low surface brightness, making them very difficult to detect. Several questions about UDGs remain unanswered: How did these dwarfs end up so extended? Are their dark matter halos – the halos of invisible matter surrounding the galaxies – special?

Now an international team of astronomers, co-led by Laura Sales, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, reports in Nature Astronomythat it has used sophisticated simulations to detect a few “quenched” UDGs in low-...