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As nuclear fusion engines, most stars live placid lives for hundreds of millions to billions of years. But near the end of their lives they can turn into crazy whirligigs, puffing off shells and jets of hot gas. Hubble has dissected such crazy fireworks in two nearby young planetary nebulas.
Jun 18th, 2020
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Every year, 2 million black hole mergers are missed - scientists work out how to detect them, revealing a lost 8 billion light years of Universe evolution.
Jun 18th, 2020
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The two-minute video explains how researchers are measuring the oldest light in the universe with the highest telescopes on Earth.
Jun 18th, 2020
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Signal from 500 million light years away is the first periodic pattern of radio bursts detected.
Jun 17th, 2020
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An international collaboration has shown that the very high-energy gamma-ray emission from quasars, galaxies with a highly energetic nucleus, is not concentrated in the region close to their central black hole but in fact extends over several thousand light-years along jets of plasma.
Jun 17th, 2020
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Mystery enshrouds the birth of swirls typical for supernova remnants like the Crab Nebula. A new 'supernova machine' may help solve it.
Jun 17th, 2020
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Instruments on-board future space missions are capable of detecting amino acids, fatty acids, and peptides, and even identify ongoing biological processes on ocean moons in our Solar System.
Jun 16th, 2020
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There may be as many as one Earth-like planet for every five Sun-like stars in the Milky way Galaxy, according to new estimates by astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission.
Jun 16th, 2020
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Light exerts a certain amount of pressure onto a body: sun sails could thus power space probes in the future. However, when light particles hit an individual molecule and knock out an electron, the molecule flies toward the light source. Atomic physicists have now observed this for the first time, confirming a 90 year-old theory.
Jun 15th, 2020
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Intense radio emissions produced by the fast-spinning stars are caused by newborn particles interacting with powerful electromagnetic fields, new plasma simulations suggest.
Jun 15th, 2020
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Is there anyone out there? This is an age-old question that researchers have now shed new light on with a study that calculates there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations throughout our Galaxy. This is an enormous advance over previous estimates which spanned from zero to billions.
Jun 15th, 2020
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Like most galaxies, the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Called Sagittarius A*, the object has captured astronomers' curiosity for decades. And now there is an effort to image it directly.
Jun 12th, 2020
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Scientists have found a way of measuring neutron lifetime from space for the first time - a discovery that could teach us more about the early universe.
Jun 12th, 2020
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A new set of precision distance measurements made with an international collection of radio telescopes have greatly increased the likelihood that theorists need to revise the 'standard model' that describes the fundamental nature of the Universe.
Jun 11th, 2020
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New research has revealed how long-lived Peter Pan discs form, which could provide new insights into how planets arise.
Jun 11th, 2020
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Radio astronomers use a dance of three exotic stars to test the universality of free fall.
Jun 10th, 2020
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The first confirmed heartbeat of a supermassive black hole is still going strong more than ten years after first being observed.
Jun 10th, 2020
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Scientists have expanded our understanding of potentially habitable planets orbiting distant stars by including a critical climate component - the presence of airborne dust.
Jun 9th, 2020
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