Category Astronomy/Space

ALMA prototype-antennas at the ALMA test facility. Credit: ESO

2 separate teams of researchers (one from Mexico, the other Sweden), have incited skepticism among the astronomy community by posting papers on the preprint server arXiv each describing a different large object they observed in the outer edges of the solar system. Both teams made their observations after reviewing data from ALMA—a cluster of radio dishes in the Chilean mountains.

The two ALMA detections on March 20 and April 14, 2014. (Credit: V. H. T. Vlemmings et al., 2015)

One of the objects was found to be near W Aquilae in the night sky—the other adjacent to Alpha Centauri ...

Mathieu Dumberry from the University of Alberta is one of only a few people in the world investigating changes in Earth rotation. Credit: John Ulan for the University of Alberta

Scientists are studying past sea-level changes to make accurate future predictions of this consequence of climate change, and they’re looking down to Earth’s core to do so. “In order to fully understand the sea-level change that has occurred in the past century, we need to understand the dynamics of the flow in Earth’s core” says Mathieu Dumberry, a professor in physics at the University of Alberta.

The connection is through the change in the speed of Earth’s rotation. Melt water from glaciers not only causes sea-level rise, but also shifts mass from the pole to the equator, which slows down the rotation...

This illustration shows a cool star, called W1906+40, marked by a raging storm near one of its poles. The storm is thought to be similar to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Scientists discovered it using NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a tiny star with a giant, cloudy storm, using data from NASA’s Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The dark storm is akin to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: a persistent, raging storm larger than Earth. “The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark. “We know this newfound storm has lasted at least 2 years, and probably longer.”

While planets have been known to have cloudy storms, this i...

Single-event noise discrimination. Credit: (c) Science 11 December 2015: Vol. 350 no. 6266 pp. 1343-1346, DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8446 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-12-optical-technique-radio-background-noise.html#jCp

A small team of researchers with the University of California has found a way to pick out a single short radio signal burst among a barrage of background noise. Currently it is impossible to separate out a unique signal if there is just one burst present—there needs to be multiple examples. That could change in the near future as the researchers on this new effort have developed a way to convert radio signals to optical signals that can be processed to filter, separate and identify individual components.

The team started with converting the radio signals to optica...