Category Astronomy/Space

Strong evidence of independent origins for 2 gas flows.
Astronomers have unveiled the enigmatic origins of two different gas streams from a baby star. Using ALMA, they found that the slow outflow and the high speed jet from a protostar have misaligned axes and that the former started to be ejected earlier than the latter...

Towards the end of their lives some 95% of stars evolve into red giants which lose their mass via a “stellar wind.” Eventually they end up as planetary nebulae, ionized gas with a central hot star, a white dwarf. Researchers form 14 European scientific institutions, among them the IAC, have detected the existence of a binary interaction which had not been noticed by the scientific community...

A volunteer working with the NASA-led Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project has found the oldest and coldest known white dwarf – an Earth-sized remnant of a Sun-like star that has died – ringed by dust and debris. Astronomers suspect this could be the first known white dwarf with multiple dust rings.

The star, LSPM J0207+3331 or J0207 for short, is forcing researchers to reconsider models of planetary syst...

When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the Moon’s surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the Moon’s surface in ingredients that could make water, NASA scientists have found.

Using a computer program, scientists simulated the chemistry that unfolds when the solar wind pelts the Moon’s surface. As the Sun streams protons to the Moon, they found, those particles interact with electrons in the lunar surface, making hydrogen (H) atoms. These atoms then migrate through the surface and latch onto the abundant oxygen (O) atoms bound in the silica (SiO2) and other oxygen-bearing molecules that make up the lunar soil, or regolith...