Category Astronomy/Space

Special delivery. Experiments using a high-powered projectile cannon suggest that asteroids can deliver surprising amounts of water when they smash into planetary bodies. Credit: Schultz Lab / Brown University

Experiments using a high-powered projectile cannon show how impacts by water-rich asteroids can deliver surprising amounts of water to planetary bodies. The research, by scientists from Brown University, could shed light on how water got to the early Earth and help account for some trace water detections on the Moon and elsewhere. “The origin and transportation of water and volatiles is one of the big questions in planetary science,” said Terik Daly, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University who led the research while completing his Ph.D. at Brown...

Inside the target chamber at the University of Rochester’s Omega Facility, a team of researchers including Princeton University’s Thomas Duffy and June Wicks use lasers to compress iron-silicon samples to the ultrahigh pressures found in the cores of super-Earths. Credit: Photo courtesy of Laboratory for Laser Energetics

How researchers are using lasers to recreate the extreme pressures of exoplanet interiors. Using high-powered laser beams, researchers have simulated conditions inside a planet three times as large as Earth. Scientists have identified more than 2,000 of these “super-Earths,” exoplanets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, the next-largest planet in our solar system...

Astronomers recently discovered a group of interacting and merging galaxies in the early universe, as seen in this artist’s illustration. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser; Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC-BY)

A dense flock of 14 galaxies from 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang is destined to become one of the most massive structures in the modern universe. For the 1st time, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a colossal cluster of galaxies. Their observations reveal at least 14 galaxies packed into an area only 4 times the diameter of the Milky Way’s galactic disk. Computer simulations of the galaxies predict that over time the cluster will assemble into one of the most massive structures in the modern universe, the astronomers report in the April 26 issue of Nature.

Galaxies w...

Wandering Supermassive Black Holes in Milky-Way-mass Halos. The Astrophysical Journal, 2018; 857 (2): L22 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aabc0a

Astronomers are beginning to understand what happens when black holes get the urge to roam the Milky Way. Typically, a supermassive black hole (SMBH) exists at the core of a massive galaxy. But sometimes SMBHs may “wander” throughout their host galaxy, remaining far from the center in regions such as the stellar halo, a nearly spherical area of stars and gas that surrounds the main section of the galaxy. Astronomers theorize that this phenomenon often occurs as a result of mergers between galaxies in an expanding universe. A smaller galaxy will join with a larger, main galaxy, depositing its own, central SMBH onto a wide orbit within the new host.

In a...