Category Astronomy/Space

This artist’s concept depicts “heartbeat stars,” which have been detected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and others. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Discovered in large numbers by NASA’s Kepler, heartbeat stars are binary stars that got their name because if you were to map out their brightness over time, the result would look like an electrocardiogram. Scientists are interested in them because they are binary systems in elongated elliptical orbits. This makes them natural laboratories for studying the gravitational effects of stars on each other. In a heartbeat star system, the distance between the two stars varies drastically as they orbit each other. Heartbeat stars can get as close as a few stellar radii to each other, and as far as 10 times that distance during one orbit.

At the point of ...

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...