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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Milky Way’s Neighbors Pick up the Pace

    January 25, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Gaia Satellite, the maps show the relative abundance of heavy elements (elements heavier than helium) in the stars. Yellow indicates fewer heavy elements and purple indicates more heavy elements.
    Credit: David Nidever (NOAO/Montana State University) and the SDSS collaboration.

    After slowly forming stars for the first few billion years of their lives, the Magellanic Clouds, near neighbors of our own Milky Way galaxy, have upped their game and are now forming new stars at a fast clip. This new insight into the history of the Clouds comes from the first detailed chemical maps made of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

    Named for explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who led the first European expedition to circumnavigate the globe, the Large and Small ...

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    Planetary Collision that formed the Moon made Life possible on Earth Study:

    January 25, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    A schematic depicting the formation of a Mars-sized planet (left) and its differentiation into a body with a metallic core and an overlying silicate reservoir. The sulfur-rich core expels carbon, producing silicate with a high carbon to nitrogen ratio. The moon-forming collision of such a planet with the growing Earth (right) can explain Earth’s abundance of both water and major life-essential elements like carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, as well as the geochemical similarity between Earth and the moon.
    Credit: Image courtesy of Rajdeep Dasgupta

    Planetary delivery explains enigmatic features of Earth’s carbon and nitrogen. Most of Earth’s essential elements for life – including most of the carbon and nitrogen in you – probably came from another planet.

    Earth most likely received the b...

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    Birth of Massive Black Holes in the Early Universe

    January 24, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A 30,000 light-year region from the Renaissance Simulation centered on a cluster of young galaxies that generate radiation (white) and metals (green) while heating the surrounding gas. A dark matter halo just outside this heated region forms three supermassive stars (inset) each over 1,000 times the mass of our sun that will quickly collapse into massive black holes and eventually supermassive black holes over billions of years. Credit: Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications

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    Mystery Orbits in Outermost reaches of Solar System not caused by ‘Planet Nine’

    January 22, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This is an artist’s impression of a Kuiper Belt object, located on the outer rim of our solar system.
    Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

    The strange orbits of some objects in the farthest reaches of our solar system, hypothesised by some astronomers to be shaped by an unknown ninth planet, can instead be explained by the combined gravitational force of small objects orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, say researchers.

    The alternative explanation to the so-called ‘Planet Nine’ hypothesis, put forward by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the American University of Beirut, proposes a disc made up of small icy bodies with a combined mass as much as ten times that of Earth...

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