Category Astronomy/Space

Vast, quasi-circular features on Venus’s surface may reveal that the planet has ongoing tectonics, according to new research based on data gathered more than 30 years ago by NASA’s Magellan mission.

On Earth, the planet’s surface is continually renewed by the constant shifting and recycling of massive sections of crust, called tectonic plates, that float atop a viscous interior. Venus doesn’t have tectonic plates, but its surface is still being deformed by molten material from below.

Seeking to better understand the underlying processes driving these deformations, the researchers studied a type of feature called a corona.

Ranging in size from dozens to hundreds of miles across, a corona is most often thought to be the location where a plume of hot, buoyant material from the p...

“Turbulence remains one of the greatest unsolved problems in classical mechanics,” says James Beattie, a postdoctoral researcher at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, who also holds a joint appointment at Princeton University.

“This despite the fact that turbulence is ubiquitous: from swirling milk in our coffee to chaotic flows in the oceans, solar wind, interstellar medium, even the plasma between galaxies.

“The key distinction in astro...

The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three scientists at Radboud University on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 10^78 years (a 1 with 78 zeros) to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 10^1100 years (a 1 with 1100 zeros). The researchers publish their findings, with a wink and dead-seriously, in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The research by black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom (all from Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands) is a follow-up to a 2023 paper by the same trio...

Quasars represent some of the most luminous and energetic phenomena in the universe. These distant powerhouses are driven by supermassive black holes—colossal gravitational engines with masses millions to billions of times that of our sun—which actively devour surrounding matter at incredible rates.

As gas, dust, and stellar material spiral inward through an accretion disk superheated to millions of degrees, this matter releases tremendous energy across the electromagnetic spectrum before crossing the event horizon. The resulting emissions can outshine entire galaxies despite originating from a region no larger than our solar system.

The discovery of billion-solar-mass black holes in distant quasars challenges conventional gr...