Category Astronomy/Space

This is an image of the R Aquarii nebula taken with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) at the Observatory of Roque de los Muchachos (ORM) in La Palma. Colours indicate different ionization stages of the same chemical element, oxygen. Credit: R. Corradi – Daniel López

Scientists have published a detailed study of the evolution of the nebula surrounding the symbiotic star R Aquarii. The study employed observations from telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, and Chile taken over the course of more than two decades. In astronomical terms, at 600 light years away, the nebula around R Aquarii is rather close to us...

Researchers expect the volcanoes in Mars’ Sisyphi Planum region to look similar to subglacial volcanoes on earth, such as Herðubreið in Iceland. Credit: Purdue University photo/Sheridan Ackiss

The climate throughout Mars’ early history has long been debated – was the Red Planet warm and wet, or cold and icy? New research published in Icarus provides evidence for the latter. Mars is littered with valley networks, deltas and lake deposits, meaning it must have had freely flowing water at some point, probably around 4 billion years ago. But climate models of the planet’s deep past haven’t been able to produce warm enough conditions to allow liquid water on the surface.

“There are people trying to model Mars’ ancient climate using the same kind of models we use here on Earth, and they’re hav...

The coloured region is the previously known Galactic disk. The present work has extended its limits much farther away: there is a probability 99.7 percent or 95.4 percent respectively that there are disk stars in the regions outside the dashed/dotted circles. Yellow dot is the position of the Sun. Background Milky Way image from ‘A Roadmap to the Milky Way’. Credit: R. Hurt, SSC-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech

A team of researchers suggests that if we could travel at the speed of light it would take us 200,000 years to cross the disc of our Galaxy. Spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way have discs which are really thin, in which the major fraction of their stars are found. These discs are limited in size, so that beyond certain radius there are very few stars left.

In our Galaxy we were not aware...

In this image of heart tissue, a single cardiac B cell lymphocyte is visible (blue surrounded by bright red). This type of immune cell triggers damaging inflammation after a heart attack, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Their study also shows that the drug pirfenidone

Existing drug dials down inflammation in mice. Scientists have zeroed in on a culprit that spurs damaging inflammation in the heart following a heart attack. The guilty party is a type of immune cell that tries to heal the injured heart but instead triggers inflammation that leads to even more damage.

Further, the researchers have found that an already approved drug effectively tamps down such inflammation in mice, protecting the heart from the progressive damage that often o...