Category Astronomy/Space

Researchers report that they can detect showers from the debris in the path of comets that pass close to Earth orbit and return as infrequently as once every 4,000 years.

Comets that circle the Sun in very elongated orbits spread their debris so thin along their orbit or eject it out of the solar system altogether that their meteor showers are hard to detect. From a new meteor shower survey published in the journal Icarus, researchers now report that they can detect showers from the debris in the path of comets that pass close to Earth orbit and are known to return as infrequent as once every 4,000 years.

“This creates a situational ...

The first-ever discovery of an extraterrestrial radioactive isotope on Earth has scientists rethinking the origins of the elements on our planet.

The tiny traces of plutonium-244 were found in ocean crust alongside radioactive iron-60. The two isotopes are evidence of violent cosmic events in the vicinity of Earth millions of years ago.

Star explosions, or supernovae create many of the heavy elements in the periodic table, including those vital for human life, such as iron, potassium and iodine.

To form even heavier elements, such as gold, uranium and plutonium it was thought that a more violent event ma...

First high-resolution model to simulate an entire gas cloud where stars are born. A team including Northwestern University astrophysicists has developed the most realistic, highest-resolution 3D simulation of star formation to date. The result is a visually stunning, mathematically-driven marvel that allows viewers to float around a colorful gas cloud in 3D space while watching twinkling stars emerge.

Called STARFORGE (Star Formation in Gaseous Environments), the computational framework is the first to simulate an entire gas cloud — 1...

Scientists have succeeded in dating some of the oldest stars in the galaxy with unprecedented precision by combining data from the stars’ oscillations with information about their chemical composition.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Birmingham, surveyed around 100 red giant stars, and were able to determine that some of these were originally part of a satellite galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus, which collided with the Milky Way early in its history.

The results, published in Nature Astronomy, revealed that the group of stars surveyed all have similar ages, or are slightly younger than the majority of the stars known to have started their lives within the Milky Way...