The nucleus is about 50 times larger than found at the heart of most known comets. Its mass is estimated to be a staggering 500 trillion tons, a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the Sun.
Apr 12th, 2022
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An international team of astronomers have used ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, to track Neptune's atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period. They found a surprising drop in Neptune's global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole.
Apr 11th, 2022
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New research shows how the impact that created the Moon's South Pole - Aitken basin is linked to the stark contrast in composition and appearance between the two sides of the Moon.
Apr 8th, 2022
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While normal stars have surfaces composed of hydrogen and helium, the newly discovered stars have their surfaces covered with carbon and oxygen, the ashes of He-burning - a very exotic composition for a star. The situation becomes more puzzling because the new stars have temperatures and radii that indicate they are still burning helium in their cores.
Apr 8th, 2022
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Astrophysicists re-examined LIGO-Virgo's O3a data and found 10 additional black hole mergers, all outside the detection threshold of the original analysis. The new mergers hint at exotic astrophysical scenarios that, for now, are only possible to study using gravitational wave astronomy.
Apr 8th, 2022
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Scientists show that using gamma rays instead of radio waves yields a clearer view to the pulsars and provides an independent and complementary way to detect gravitational waves.
Apr 7th, 2022
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The record-breaking find is the most distant megamaser of its kind ever detected, at about five billion light years from Earth.
Apr 7th, 2022
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Named HD1, the galaxy candidate is some 13.5 billion light-years away and scientists have begun to speculate exactly what the galaxy is.
Apr 7th, 2022
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In two new papers, teams of Hubble astronomers are reporting on bizarre weather conditions on these sizzling worlds. It's raining vaporized rock on one planet, and another one has its upper atmosphere getting hotter rather than cooler because it is being 'sunburned' by intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from its star.
Apr 6th, 2022
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Juno spacecraft discovered clues about mysterious processes creating the dance of the auroral footprints.
Apr 5th, 2022
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Gravitational waves could reveal whether general relativity must be modified at the edges of black holes.
Apr 5th, 2022
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The Hubble Space Telescope has directly photographed evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming through what researchers describe as an 'intense and violent process'. This discovery supports a long-debated theory for how planets like Jupiter form, called 'disk instability'.
Apr 4th, 2022
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Theoretical model probes the origins of unexpectedly high-energy radiation from the aftermath of cosmic explosions.
Apr 4th, 2022
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One of the most important open questions in planetary formation theory is the story of Jupiter's origin. Using sophisticated computer modelling, researchers now shed new light on Jupiter's formation history.
Apr 4th, 2022
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The NASA Perseverance rover, which has been exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars since February 2021, has recorded the acoustic environment of the red planet for the first time.
Apr 1st, 2022
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While for humans the constants might be death and taxes, for planets the constants are gravity and collisions.
Mar 30th, 2022
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The Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang - the farthest individual star ever seen to date.
Mar 30th, 2022
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Using data from the VISTA survey of the Magellanic Clouds system, researchers confirmed the existence of elongated orbits which are at the backbone of the bar formation process.
Mar 29th, 2022
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