Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers analyzed light data from a piece of supernova shrapnel to gain clues about where it came from. About 2,000 light-years away from Earth, there is a star catapulting toward the edge of the Milky Way. This particular star, known as LP 40−365 is one of a unique breed of fast-moving stars — remnant pieces of massive white dwarf stars — that have survived in chunks after a gigantic stellar explosion.

“This star is moving so fast that it’s almost certainly leaving the galaxy…[it’s] moving almost two million miles an hour,” says JJ Hermes, Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of astronomy...

Researchers have discovered long narrow dust filaments which surround and feed black holes in the centers of galaxies, and which could be the natural cause of the darkening of the centers of many galaxies when their nuclear black holes are active.

The black holes at the centres of galaxies are the most mysterious objects in the Universe, not only because of the huge quantities of material within them, millions of times the mass of the Sun, but because of the incredibly dense concentration of matter in a volume no bigger than that of our Solar ...

A combination of a once-debunked 19th-century identification of a water-carrying iron mineral and the fact that these rocks are extremely common on Earth, suggests the existence of a substantial water reservoir on Mars, according to a team of geoscientists.

“One of my student’s experiments was to crystalize hematite,” said Peter J. Heaney, professor of geosciences, Penn State. “She came up with an iron-poor compound, so I went to Google Scholar and found two papers from the 1840s where German mineralogists, using wet chemistry, proposed iron-poor versions of hematite that contained water.”

In 1844, Rudolf Hermann named his mineral turgite and in 1847 August Breithaupt named hi...

Watching X-rays flung out into the universe by the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away, Stanford University astrophysicist Dan Wilkins noticed an intriguing pattern. He observed a series of bright flares of X-rays—exciting, but not unprecedented—and then, the telescopes recorded something unexpected: additional flashes of X-rays that were smaller, later and of different “colors” than the bright flares.

According to theory, these luminous echoes were consistent with X-rays reflected from behind the black hole—but even a basic understanding of black holes tells us that is a strange place for light to come from.

“Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anythin...