Category Astronomy/Space

New research shows how the fundamental law of conservation of charge could break down near a black hole. Singularities such as those at the centre of black holes, where density becomes infinite, are often said to be places where physics ‘breaks down’. However, this doesn’t mean that ‘anything’ could happen, and physicists are interested in which laws could break down, and how.

Now, a research team from Imperial College London and the Cockcroft Institute and Lancaster University have proposed a way that singularities could violate the law of conservation of charge. Their theory is published in Annalen der Physik.

Co-author Professor Martin McCall, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “‘Physics breaks down at a singularity’ is one of the most famous statements in pop-...

UMD-led team used NASA’s SOFIA telescope to capture high-resolution details of a star nursery in the Milky Way. University of Maryland researchers created the first high-resolution image of an expanding bubble of hot plasma and ionized gas where stars are born...

A new analysis of known exoplanets has revealed that Earth-like conditions on potentially habitable planets may be much rarer than previously thought. The work focuses on the conditions required for oxygen-based photosynthesis to develop on a planet, which would enable complex biospheres of the type found on Earth. The study is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The number of confirmed planets in our own Milky Way galaxy now numbers into the thousands...

New findings published this week in Physical Review Letters suggest that carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen cosmic rays travel through the galaxy toward Earth in a similar way, but, surprisingly, that iron arrives at Earth differently. Learning more about how cosmic rays move through the galaxy helps address a fundamental, lingering question in astrophysics: How is matter generated and distributed across the universe?

“So what does this finding mean?” asks John Krizmanic, a senior scientist with UMBC’s...