Category Astronomy/Space

Hubble uncovers a vast, complex dust structure, about 150 billion miles across, enveloping the young star HR 4796A. A bright, narrow inner ring of dust is already known to encircle the star, based on much earlier Hubble images. This newly discovered huge dust structure around the system may have implications for what a yet-unseen planetary system looks like around the 8-million-year-old star. Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Schneider (Univ. of Arizona)

Astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to uncover a vast, complex dust structure, about 150 billion miles across, enveloping the young star HR 4796A. A bright, narrow, inner ring of dust is already known to encircle the star and may have been corralled by the gravitational pull of an unseen giant planet...

An example of 3D distribution of dark matter reconstructed via tomographic methods using the weak lensing technique combined with the redshift estimates of the background galaxies. (Credit: University of Tokyo/NAOJ)

A research team of multiple institutes, including the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and University of Tokyo, released an unprecedentedly wide and sharp dark matter map based on the newly obtained imaging data by Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope. The dark matter distribution is estimated by the weak gravitational lensing technique. The team located the positions and lensing signals of the dark matter halos and found indications that the number of halos could be inconsistent with what the simplest cosmological model suggests...

An asteroid belt orbits a star in this artist’s rendering. In a new study, experiments at Berkeley Lab explored possible chemical pathways that could form complex hydrocarbons — like those found in some meteorite samples – in space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Experiments reveal how a hydrocarbon called pyrene could form near stars. Scientists have used lab experiments to retrace the chemical steps leading to the creation of complex hydrocarbons in space, showing pathways to forming 2D carbon-based nanostructures in a mix of heated gases...

Schrödinger in Space: An artist’s impression of research presented in Batygin (2018), MNRAS 475, 4. Propagation of waves through an astrophysical disk can be understood using Schrödinger’s equation – a cornerstone of quantum mechanics. Credit: James Tuttle Keane, California Institute of Technology

A surprising new discovery from a Caltech researcher suggests that the Schrödinger Equation – the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics – is remarkably useful in describing the long-term evolution of certain astronomical structures. Massive astronomical objects are frequently encircled by groups of smaller objects that revolve around them, like the planets around the sun...