Category Astronomy/Space

NASA-funded CHESS mission will check out the space between stars Floating clouds of the interstellar medium are the focus of the NASA-funded CHESS sounding rocket mission, which will check out the earliest stages of star formation. Here, the CHESS payload is integrated with the sounding rocket before launch. Credit: Kevin France

Deep in space between distant stars, space is not empty. Instead, there drifts vast clouds of neutral atoms and molecules, as well as charged plasma particles called the interstellar medium—that may, over millions of years, evolve into new stars and even planets. These floating interstellar reservoirs are the focus of the NASA-funded CHESS sounding rocket mission, which will check out the earliest stages of star formation.

CHESS—short for the Colorado High-resolu...

A model of the crystal structure of cristobalite X-I, which had never before been discovered in other materials. This high-pressure phase of cristobalite is made up of two layers (green and blue), each composed of Si?O. Credit: Leonid Dubrovinsky

A research group at the University of Bayreuth has found a long-sought explanation for the apparent contradictions implicit in the composition of lunar and Martian meteorites. In cooperation with the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble and research partners in Lyon and Vienna, the Bayreuth scientists led by Prof. Dubrovinsky were able to demonstrate how meteorites could contain within narrow spaces minerals whose formation conditions are quite different.

When asteroids or co...

The annihilation rates have a signature non-monotonic velocity dependence over and above the resonances, e.g., for DM mass larger than 4 TeV the galactic annihilation rate (solid line) exceeds that in clusters (dashed line) and dwarf galaxies (dot- dashed line).
Credit: Anirban Das, Basudeb Dasgupta

A new theory predicts how dark matter may be annihilating much more rapidly in the Milky Way, than in smaller or larger galaxies and the early Universe. Anirban Das, with his advisor Dr. Basudeb Dasgupta, pursued this possibility because almost all observations made so far indicate no signals of dark matter annihilation anywhere – except the tantalizing signals from the Milky Way seen by the PAMELA and AMS02 detector and the Fermi gamma ray telescope...

1. A yet to be discovered, unseen “planetary mass object” makes its existence known by ruffling the orbital plane of distant Kuiper Belt objects, according to research by Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The object is pictured on a wide orbit far beyond Pluto in this artist’s illustration. (Image: Heather Roper/LPL)
2. A planetary mass object the size of Mars would be sufficient to produce the observed perturbations in the distant Kuiper Belt.
Credit: Heather Roper/LPL

An unknown, unseen “planetary mass object” may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets. This object would be different from – and much closer than – the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence yet awaits confirmation...