Category Astronomy/Space

HIP68468, a twin star to the sun about 300 light-years away, may have swallowed one or more of its planets, based on lithium and refractory elements recently discovered near its surface. Credit: Illustration by Gabi Perez / Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

An international team has made the rare discovery of a planetary system with a host star similar to Earth’s sun. Especially intriguing is the star’s unusual composition, which indicates it ingested some of its planets. “It doesn’t mean that the sun will ‘eat’ the Earth any time soon,” said Jacob Bean, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UChicago. “But our discovery provides an indication that violent histories may be common for planetary systems, including our own.”

Unlike the artificial planet-destroying Death Star...

In just the right conditions, the destruction of a star in a black hole’s gravitational tide should produce an unusual flash of light. Credit: Chandra/Harvard

When astronomers and astrophysicists observe flashes of light in the dark sky, they assume they have seen a supernova. Possibly a star has burnt up its supply of nuclear fuel and collapsed, throwing off its outer layers into space; or maybe a dense white dwarf siphoned off material from a companion star until it exploded from excess weight. But a flash of light observed on June 14, 2015 did not fit any of the usual models.

For one thing, the intensity of the light was double that of the brightest supernova recorded up to that point. So astrophysicists were already asking what process could have caused it...

In these celestial objects dark matter mimics light

Statistical analysis of mini-spiral galaxies shows an unexpected interaction between dark matter and ordinary matter. According to the SISSA study where the relationship is obvious and cannot be explained in a trivial way within the context of the Standard Model, these objects may serve as “portals” to a completely new form of Physics which can explain phenomena like matter and dark energy.

They resemble a spiral galaxy like ours, only 10,000X smaller: the mini-spiral galaxies studied by Professor Paolo Salucci et al may prove to be “the portal that leads us to a whole new Physics, going beyond the standard model of particles to explain matter and dark energy,” says Salucci...

This is an artist impression of the whirlwind being liftet up from the protoplanetary disk around the approximately 100,000 year old protostar, TMC1A. Credit: Per Bjerkeli/David Lamm/BOID

Researchers from Niels Bohr Institute have used ALMA telescopes to observe the early stages in the formation of a new solar system. For the first time they have seen how a powerful whirlwind shoot out from the rotating disc of gas and dust surrounding the young star. A new solar system is formed in a large cloud of gas and dust that contracts and condenses due to the force of gravity and eventually becomes so compact that the centre collapses into a ball of gas where the pressure heats the material, resulting in a glowing globe of gas, a star...