Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers used the powerful ALMA telescope to discover that in other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy (seen here) there is potentially a large population of young planets – similar in mass to Neptune or Jupiter – at wide-orbit that are not detectable by other current planet searching techniques...

Astronomers have cataloged nearly 4,000 exoplanets in orbit around distant stars. Though the discovery of these newfound worlds has taught us much, there is still a great deal we do not know about the birth of planets and the precise cosmic recipes that spawn the wide array of planetary bodies we have already uncovered, including hot Jupiters, massive rocky worlds, icy dwarf planets, and – hopefully someday soon – distant analogs of Earth.

To help answer these and other intriguing questions, a team of astronomers has conducted ALMA’s first large-scale, high-resolution survey of protoplanetary disks, the belts of dust and gas around young stars.

Known as the Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP), this “Large Program” of the Atacama Large Millimeter/su...

The effects of a supernova – and possibly more than one – on large ocean life like school-bus-sized Megalodon 2.6 million years ago are detailed in a new article. About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus.

The effects of such a supernova – and possibly more than ...

Researchers have created tiny droplets of the ultra-hot matter that once filled the early universe, forming three distinct shapes and siztiny droplets of the ultra-hot matter that once filled the early universees: circles, ellipses and triangles.

The study, published today in Nature Physics, stems from the work of an international team of scientists and focuses on a liquid-like state of matter called a quark gluon plasma. Physicists believe that this matter filled the entire universe during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang when the universe was still too hot for particles to come together to make atoms.

CU Boulder Professor Jamie Nagle and colleagues on an ex...