Spiral galaxies are one of the most commonly known types of galaxy. Most people think of them as large round disks, and know that our Milky Way is counted among their number. What most people don’t realize is that many spiral galaxies have a type of warping effect that, when you look at them edge […]
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Our universe contains some enormous black holes. The supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy has a mass of 4 million Suns, but it’s rather small as galactic black holes go. Many galactic black holes have a billion solar masses, and the most massive known black hole is estimated to have a mass […]
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Audio narration by the author is available above 10 billion years ago, galaxies of the Universe were ablaze with the light of newly forming stars. This epic phase of history is known as “Cosmic Noon” – the height of all star creation. Galaxies like our Milky Way aren’t creating stars at nearly the rates they […]
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“The system exists against the odds,” said Brian Powell, a data scientist at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center about the source of starlight that was mysteriously brightening and dimming some 1,900 light-years away. The source, named TIC 168789840, is a system of three pairs of binary stars: three different stellar couplets revolving […]
Read MoreIt was an anticlimactic launch day at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida this morning (Jan. 23), where SpaceX was due to launch a record 143 satellites on a single Falcon 9 rocket. The company was targeting a 9:40 a.m. EST (1440 GMT) launch for the Transporter-1 mission, but scrubbed a little over six […]
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Originally posted 2020-06-11 15:00:52. By Michael Le Page Mice can enter a hibernation-like stateRudmer Zwerver / Alamy Two groups of researchers have independently discovered a “brain switch” that makes starving mice enter a hibernation-like state to save energy. They hope it may be possible to induce similar states in people. “Suspended animation could transform medicine […]
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Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine rarely causes severe allergic reactions, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Between Dec. 21 and Jan. 10, more than 4.04 million people were given Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, but only 10 developed a serious, potentially life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. That works out to be […]
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NASA’s epic Cassini mission at Saturn is still generating valuable scientific data more than three years after its demise. Data from one of the spacecraft’s last flybys of Titan, a large moon with the precursors of life’s chemistry, reveals that a huge lake on the surface called Kraken Mare is more than 1,000 feet ( […]
Read MoreHigh toward the south this week at around 9:30 p.m. local time, we can see a “Great Hexagon” of bright winter stars; a pattern that was first conceived by author Hans Augusto Rey (1898-1977) in his popular sky guide “The Stars — A New Way to See Them.” Mr. Rey’s chief claim to fame was […]
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A new composite image of Jupiter’s atmosphere shows a hot spot glowing brightly in infrared wavelengths. Astronomers and amateur image processors combined data from the NASA Juno spacecraft at Jupiter and the Gemini North Telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to create the epic image. Although researchers have known about hot spots on Jupiter for more […]
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