Category Astronomy/Space

This is a tiny cosmic dust particle. The black circles are air filled pockets called vesicles. Credit: Image courtesy of Imperial College London

Bubbles acting like parachutes are deployed by some cosmic dust particles on their entry into Earth’s atmosphere, preventing them from burning up. This is the conclusion of a new study carried out by a researcher from Imperial College London. Cosmic dust particles originate from events such the arrival of comets in the inner solar system and collisions between asteroids, which pulverises them into dust. Some make it through the rapid descent through Earth’s atmosphere, providing microscopic records of some of the earliest events in our solar system.

The researcher found that cosmic dust particles containing water-rich minerals survive atmospheric ...

The layer cake of sedimentary rock near Big Bend, Texas, shows the alternating layers of shale and limestone characteristic of the rock laid down at the bottom of a shallow ocean during the late Cretaceous period. The rock holds the 87 million-year-old signature of a ‘resonance transition’ in the orbits of Mars and Earth, definitive geologic evidence that the orbits of the planets in our solar system behave differently than prevailing theory, which held that the planets orbit like clockwork in a quasiperiodic manner. Credit: Bradley Sageman, Northwestern University

Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of WM and NW has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in th...

© ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA). Left, an image of comet Chury showing outgassing of water vapor, which entrains dust (© ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM). Right, the neck region, between the comet’s two lobes. Various types of relief can be seen, including the dunes, at bottom left (circled in red), in the sandy region.

Surprising images from the Rosetta spacecraft show the presence of dune-like patterns on the surface of comet Chury. Researchers at the Laboratoire de Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes (CNRS/ESPCI Paris/UPMC/Université Paris Diderot) studied the available images and modeled the outgassing of vapor to try to explain the phenomenon...

The gamma-ray excess (shown in yellow-white) at the heart of M31 hints at unexpected goings-on in the galaxy’s central region. Scientists think the signal could be produced by a variety of processes, including a population of pulsars or even dark matter. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration and Bill Schoening, Vanessa Harvey/REU program/NOAO/AURA/NSF

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found a signal at the center of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy that could indicate the presence of dark matter. The gamma-ray signal is similar to one seen by Fermi at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light, produced by the universe’s most energetic phenomena...