Left: An illustration shows what a shrouded black hole might look like. Right: An image of the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) highlights where the new cocooned black holes were detected. More than two dozen missing “cocooned” black holes have…
A tubby tardigradelike shape appeared in recent images of the sun, captured by the NASA and ESA mission Solar Orbiter. No, tardigrades haven’t colonized the sun. But a tardigrade-shaped speck on a solar mission’s images recently led to some joking…
A white dwarf corpse blasting out of a supernova An intimate pair of distant stars had a violent falling-out, sending both careening millions of miles a day toward opposite ends of the universe. Relationships, huh? In 2015, astronomers discovered one…
For the first time ever, physicists have spotted rare, ghostly particles produced by a weird kind of fusion inside the sun. The particles, called CNO-produced neutrinos, traveled from the sun to a detector buried deep beneath a mountain in Italy.…
As the novel coronavirus continues to infect people around the world, news articles and social media posts about the outbreak continue to spread online. Unfortunately, this relentless flood of information can make it difficult to separate fact from fiction —…
Gravity can be a real downer when you are trying to grow organs. That’s why experiments in space are so valuable. They have revealed a new perspective into biological sciences, including insights into making human tissues. Gravity influences cellular behavior…
We are highly sensitive to people around us. As infants, we observe our parents and teachers, and from them we learn how to walk, talk, read — and use smartphones. There seems to be no limit to the complexity of…
yside of Mars, is similar to the night glow seen around Earth’s atmosphere from space.” class=” block-image-ads hero-image” onerror=”if(this.src && this.src.indexOf(‘missing-image.svg’) !== -1){return true;};this.parentNode.replaceChild(window.missingImage(),this)” srcset=” 320w, 480w, 650w, 970w, 1024w” sizes=”(min-width: 1000px) 602px, calc(100vw – 40px)”…
In this illustration, a pulsar (PSR J0337-1715) is shown with two white dwarf companions. The green mesh illustrates the curvature of space-time caused by the different masses. (Size and distances of the three components are not to scale.) Once again,…
Think back to life before stay-at-home orders. Does it feel like just yesterday? Or does it seem like ages ago — like some distant era? Of course, time is precise. It takes 23.9 hours for the Earth to make one…
In this episode of Life’s Little Mysteries, we’ll take a closer look at the universe, which contains all elements, energy, matter and contents of space. Where did the universe come from, what’s it made of and will it ever stop…
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) — a network of radio telescopes in the Australian outback — is scouring the skies for traces of neutral hydrogen, the last surviving molecule of the cosmic dark ages. Update: This study, which had been…