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Milky Way had a blowout bash 6 million years ago

The center of the Milky Way galaxy is currently a quiet place where a supermassive black hole slumbers, only occasionally slurping small sips of hydrogen gas. But it wasn't always this way. A new study shows that 6 million years ago, when the first human ancestors known as hominins walked the Earth, our galaxy's core blazed forth furiously.

Aug 30th, 2016

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Astronomers probe peculiar age-defying star

Located more than 12,000 light-years from Earth, the object first stood out as peculiar when it was observed at particular radio frequencies. Several teams of astronomers studied it using ground-based telescopes and concluded that it is an oxygen-rich star about 10 times as massive as the sun. The question was: What kind of star?

Aug 29th, 2016

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ALMA finds unexpected trove of gas around larger stars

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) surveyed dozens of young stars and discovered that the larger variety have surprisingly rich reservoirs of carbon monoxide gas in their debris disks. In contrast, the lower-mass, Sun-like stars have debris disks that are virtually gas-free.

Aug 25th, 2016

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What do aliens look like? The clue is in evolution

Speculating about what aliens look like has kept children, film producers and scientists amused for decades. If they exist, will extra terrestrials turn out to look similar to us, or might they take a form beyond our wildest imaginings? The answer to this question really depends on how we think evolution works at the deepest level.

Aug 19th, 2016

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Stellar lab in Sagittarius

There are over 1000 known open star clusters within the Milky Way, with a wide range of properties, such as size and age, that provide astronomers with clues to how stars form, evolve and die. The main appeal of these clusters is that all of their stars are born together out of the same material.

Aug 10th, 2016

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Is Earthly life premature from a cosmic perspective?

The universe is 13.8 billion years old, while our planet formed just 4.5 billion years ago. Some scientists think this time gap means that life on other planets could be billions of years older than ours. However, new theoretical work suggests that present-day life is actually premature from a cosmic perspective.

Aug 1st, 2016

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Ancient eye in the sky

An international team of researchers have discovered an extremely rare, double source plane gravitational lensing system, in which two distant galaxies are simultaneously lensed by a foreground galaxy. The team dubbed the system 'Eye of Horus'. Such a rare system is a unique probe of fundamental physics of galaxies and cosmology.

Jul 26th, 2016

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Astronomers discover dizzying spin of the Milky Way galaxy's 'halo'

Astronomers have discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy's disk, which contains our stars, planets, gas, and dust. This new knowledge sheds light on how individual atoms have assembled into stars, planets, and galaxies like our own, and what the future holds for these galaxies.

Jul 25th, 2016

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