Category Astronomy/Space

All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu, scientists said Monday.

The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system.

One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago.

The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility.

In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300-million-kilometer (185-million-mile) mission to land on Ryugu, a 900-meter-wide (2,950-feet-wide) asteroid.

It successfully managed to c...

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors—a small, gas-rich galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, and bound to our galaxy by gravity, alongside its companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (1¹LMC). All three galaxies have been interacting for hundreds of millions of years.

The SMC is also one of the most studied galaxies in the sky. Astronomers have catalogued its stars, mapped its gas and tracked its motion for more than half a century. Yet a basic question about it has remained...

All the essential ingredients to make the DNA and RNA underpinning life on Earth have been discovered in samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu, scientists said Monday.

The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system.

One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago.

The asteroids that hurtle through our solar system give scientists a rare chance to study this possibility.

In 2014, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off on a 300-million-kilometer...

Gold cannot form until certain unstable atomic nuclei break apart. Exactly how those nuclear transformations unfold has long been difficult to determine. Now, nuclear physicists at the University of Tennessee (UT) report three discoveries in a single study that clarify important parts of this process. Their findings could help researchers build improved models of the stellar events that create heavy elements and better predict the behavior of exotic atomic nuclei.

Heavy elements such as gold and platinum are forged under extraordinary conditions, including when stars collapse, explode, or collide. These events trigger the rapid neutron capture process (or r-process for short). During this process, an atomic nucleus absorbs neutrons in rapid succession...