Category Astronomy/Space

The unusual system of three ‘super puff’ planets has at least one more planet, revealed by its gravitational tug on other planets. An unusual planetary system with three known ultra-low density “super-puff” planets has at least one more planet, according to new research led by researchers from Penn State and Osaka University...

As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can’t see and so far haven’t been able to detect, researchers have now proposed a model where it is produced before the Big Bang.

Their idea is that dark matter would be produced during a infinitesimally short inflationary phase when the size of the universe quickly expanded exponentially. The new model was published in Physical Review Letters by three scientists from Texas in the US.

An intriguing idea among cosmologists is that dark matter was produced through its interaction with a thermal bath of some species, and its abundance is created by “freeze-out” or “freeze-in...

An international team of scientists has published a study highlighting the potential role of iron sulfides in the formation of life in early Earth’s terrestrial hot springs. According to the researchers, the sulfides may have catalyzed the reduction of gaseous carbon dioxide into prebiotic organic molecules via nonenzymatic pathways.

This work, appearing in Nature Communications, offers new insights into Earth’s early carbon cycles and prebiotic chemical reactions, underscoring the significance of iron sulfides in supporting the terrestrial hot springs origin of life hypothesis.

The study was conducted by Dr...

A small team of astrophysicists at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with colleagues from the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found evidence that Alfvén waves in space plasmas speed up ion beams, resulting in the creation of small-scale acoustic waves that in turn generate heat in the magnetosphere.

In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group used data from the four-spacecraft Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission that took place in 20...