Category Astronomy/Space

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter view of Schiaparelli landing site

NASA’s MRO has identified new markings on the surface of Mars that are believed to be related to ESA’s ExoMars Schiaparelli entry, descent and landing technology demonstrator module. Schiaparelli entered the martian atmosphere at 14:42 GMT on 19 October for its 6-minute descent to the surface, but contact was lost shortly before expected touchdown. Data recorded by its mothership, the Trace Gas Orbiter, TGO, are currently being analysed to understand what happened during the descent sequence.

In the meantime, the low-resolution CTX camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) took pictures of the expected touchdown site in Meridiani Planum on 20 October as part of a planned imaging campaign...

The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate, as previously thought, but rather, at a constant rate, suggests new research. (Stock image) Credit: © watoson / Fotolia

5 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to 3 astronomers for their discovery, in 1990s, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Their conclusions were based on analysis of Type Ia supernovae – the spectacular thermonuclear explosion of dying stars – picked up by the Hubble and large ground-based telescopes. It led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by ‘dark energy’ that drives this accelerating expansion.

Now, a team led by Prof Subir Sarkar of Oxford University’s Dept of Physics has cast doubt on this standard cosmological concept...

Four-dimensional unsubtraction from the loop-tree duality

Researchers at the universities of Valencia and Florence propose an approach to the experimental data generated by the LHC that solves the infinity problem without breaching the 4 dimensions of space-time. The theories currently used to interpret the data emerging from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which have so far most notably led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, are poorly defined within the four dimensions of space-time established by Einstein in his Theory of Special Relativity. In order to avoid the infinities resulting from the calculations that these theories inspire, new dimensions are added in a mathematical trick which, although effective, does not reflect what we now know about our Universe.

Now though, a group...

An artist’s conception of this unusual system. Credit: Courtesy of Jonathan Holden/Disk Detective

A group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers, including Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, joined forces to discover an unusual hunting ground for exoplanets. They found a star surrounded by the oldest known circumstellar disk – a primordial ring of gas and dust that orbits around a young star and from which planets can form as the material collides and aggregates.The team described a newly identified red dwarf star with a warm circumstellar disk, of the kind associated with young planetary systems. Circumstellar disks around red dwarfs like this one are rare to begin with, but this star, called AWI0005x3s, appears to have sustained its disk for an exceptionally long time.

“Most disks o...