Category Astronomy/Space

The frigid lakeshores of Saturn’s moon Titan might be encrusted with strange, unearthly minerals, according to new research being presented here. Scientists re-creating Titan-esque conditions in their laboratory have discovered new compounds and minerals not found on Earth, including a co-crystal made of solid acetylene and butane.

Acetylene and butane exist on Earth as gases and are commonly used for welding and camp stove fuel. On Titan, with its extremely cold temperatures, acetylene and butane are solid and combine to form crystals, the new research found.

The new mineral might be responsible for the bathtub rings that are suspected to exist around Titan’s hyd...

A breakthrough finding overturns assumptions about the maturation of galaxies and may represent a phase of every galaxy’s life cycle that was unknown until now. At the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, Allison Kirkpatrick, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, will announce her discovery of “cold quasars” – galaxies featuring an abundance of cold gas that still can produce new stars despite having a quasar at the center.
Her news brie...

First heat images of the rings enable scientists to determine their temperature...

Magnetic disturbances caused by phenomena like the northern lights can be tracked by a ‘social network’ of ground-based instruments, according to a new study from the University of Warwick.

The researchers, led by Professor Sandra Chapman from the University’s Department of Physics, have for the first time characterised the observations from over 100 ground based magnetometers in terms of a time-varying directed network of connections. They monitored the development of geomagnetic substorms using the same mathematics used to study social networks. The magnetometers ‘befriend’ one another when they see the same signal of a propagating disturbance.

The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, o...