Category Astronomy/Space

WASP167bKELT13b. Credit: Image courtesy of Keele University

Researchers led by a team at Keele University have discovered a new ‘Hot Jupiter’ exoplanet. The new giant planet was jointly discovered by a WASP/KELT survey collaboration, marking the first time an exoplanet has been discovered between two planet search groups. The exoplanet, WASP-167b/ KELT-13b, is several times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its parent star every two days. Its host star, WASP-176/KELT-13, is one of the hottest and most rapidly rotating stars known to host such a planet.

The Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) and the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) exoplanet surveys observed the host star between 2006 and 2013 using the WASP-South telescope and the KELT-South telescope at the South African ...

Different types of plasma waves triggered by various mechanisms, occupy different regions of space around Earth.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith

NASA’s Van Allen Probes have observed a new population of space sound waves, called plasmaspheric hiss, which are important in removing high-energy particles from around Earth that can damage satellites. Disturbances in space, can cause waves which occur as fluctuating electric and magnetic fields plow through clumps of ions and electrons that compose the plasma, pushing some to accelerated speeds. This interaction controls the balance of highly energetic particles injected and lost from in the near-Earth environment.

One type of plasma wave fundamental to shaping our near-Earth environment are whistler-mode waves...

Scientists at UConn and North Carolina State University have found that reducing oxygen content in some nanocrystalline materials may improve their grain size stability at elevated temperatures. This graphic shows the pattern of stability for Iron-Chromium-Hafnium nanograins with oxygen (represented by red triangles) and without oxygen (represented by black squares) as temperature increases relative to thermodynamic prediction.
Credit: Image courtesy of Peiman Shahbeigi-Roodposhti

Researchers at the University of Connecticut have found that reducing oxygen in some nanocrystalline materials may improve their strength and durability at elevated temperatures, a promising enhancement that could lead to better biosensors, faster jet engines, and greater capacity semiconductors...

This image shows the model of the tidally shredded Sagittarius dwarf galaxy wrapping around a 3-D representation of the Milky Way disk (flattened blue spiral). The yellow dot represents the position of the Sun. Credit: David R. Law/UCLA.

An international team has performed detailed measurements of the chemical composition of 158 red giant stars in the nearby Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. The study is so far the largest and most chemically extensive high-resolution survey of this galaxy. Discovered in 1994, Sagittarius is a nearby, massive, elliptical loop-shaped satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The dwarf is currently merging with our galaxy, resulting in massive tidal tails that can be found in the Galactic halo...