Atlas tagged posts

A team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton have uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed.

The explosion is more than ten times brighter than any known supernova (exploding star) and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole.

The explosion, known as AT2021lwx, has currently lasted over three years, compared to most supernovae which are only visibly bright for a few months. It took place nearly 8 billion light years away, when the universe was around 6 billion years old, and is still being detected by a network of telescopes.

The researchers believe that the explosion is a result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly th...

A small asteroid has been caught in the process of spinning so fast it’s throwing off material, according to new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. Images from Hubble show two narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris streaming from the asteroid (6478) Gault...

Formation of Atlas, one of the small inner moons of Saturn. Its flat, ravioli-like shape is the result of a merging collision of two similar-sized bodies. The picture is a snapshot in mid-collision, before the moon’s reorientation due to tides is completed. Credit: A. Verdier

The small inner moons of Saturn look like giant ravioli and spaetzle. Their spectacular shape has been revealed by the Cassini spacecraft. For the first time, researchers of the University of Bern show how these moons were formed. The peculiar shapes are a natural outcome of merging collisions among similar-sized little moons as computer simulations demonstrate.

When Martin Rubin, astrophysicist at the University of Bern, saw the images of Saturn’s moons Pan and Atlas on the internet, he was puzzled...

Argonne scientists and collaborators used the Gammasphere, this powerful gamma ray spectrometer, to help create the right conditions to cause and spot a long-theorized effect called nuclear excitation by electron capture. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

For the first time, physicists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and their collaborators, led by a team from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, demonstrated a long-theorized nuclear effect. This advance tests theoretical models that describe how nuclear and atomic realms interact and may also provide new insights into how star elements are created. Physicists first predicted the effect, called nuclear excitation by electron capture (NEEC), over 40 years ago. But scientists had not seen it until now...