Category Astronomy/Space

The sky around W Hydrae, as seen in visible light. Credit: Digitized Sky Survey

A Chalmers-led team of astronomers has for the first time observed details on the surface of an aging star with the same mass as the Sun. The star is a giant, its diameter twice the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, but also that the star’s atmosphere is affected by powerful, unexpected shock waves. The research is published in Nature Astronomy on 30 October 2017. The new ALMA images show for the first time details on the surface of the red giant W Hydrae, 320 light years distant in the constellation of Hydra, the Water Snake.

W Hydrae is an example of an AGB (asymptotic giant branch) star. Such stars are cool, bright, old and lose mass via stellar winds...

Astronomers at UMass Amherst and in Mexico, using the Large Millimeter Telescope located on the summit of a 15,000-foot extinct volcano in Mexico’s central state of Puebla, have detected the second most distant dusty, star-forming galaxy ever found in the universe, born witin the first one billion years after the Big Bang. It is the oldest object ever detected by the LMT. Credit: UMass Amherst

Astronomy team image one of the first massive galaxies to form, 12.8 billion years ago...

Diamidophosphate (DAP)

Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a compound that may have been a crucial factor in the origins of life on Earth. Origins-of-life researchers have hypothesized that a chemical reaction called phosphorylation may have been crucial for the assembly of three key ingredients in early life forms: short strands of nucleotides to store genetic information, short chains of amino acids (peptides) to do the main work of cells, and lipids to form encapsulating structures such as cell walls. Yet, no one has ever found a phosphorylating agent that was plausibly present on early Earth and could have produced these three classes of molecules side-by-side under the same realistic conditions.

TSRI chemists have now identified just such a compound: diamidoph...

Light reflecting off of the primary and secondary mirrors of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope as mirrors are being aligned Credits: NASA/M. McClare

About 1 million miles away from the nearest eye surgeon, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be able to perfect its own vision while in orbit. Though the Webb telescope will focus on stars and galaxies approximately 13.5 billion light-years away, its sight goes through a similar process as you would if you underwent laser vision correction surgery to be able to focus on an object 10 feet across the room...