Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

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Hubble uncovers black hole disk that shouldn't exist

As if black holes weren't mysterious enough, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a supermassive black hole at the heart of the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.

Jul 11th, 2019

Astronomers expand cosmic 'cheat sheet' in hunt for life

Using nature's color palette from early Earth, astronomers have created a cosmic 'cheat sheet' in order to understand where discovered exoplanets may fall along their own evolutionary spectrum.

Jul 10th, 2019

Exactly how fast is the universe expanding?

The collision of two neutron stars (GW170817) flung out an extraordinary fireball of material and energy that is allowing a team of astrophysicists to calculate a more precise value for the Hubble constant, the speed of the universe's expansion.

Jul 9th, 2019

Tungsten as interstellar radiation shielding?

Metallophilic microorganisms could benefit from the heavy metal in harsh survival conditions.

Jul 9th, 2019

Supercomputer shows 'Chameleon Theory' could change how we think about gravity

Supercomputer simulations of galaxies have shown that Einstein's theory of General Relativity might not be the only way to explain how gravity works or how galaxies form.

Jul 8th, 2019

Massive stars grow same way as light stars, just bigger

Astronomers obtained the first detailed face-on view of a gaseous disk feeding the growth of a massive baby star. They found that it shares many common features with lighter baby stars. This implies that the process of star formation is the same, regardless of the final mass of the resulting star.

Jul 8th, 2019

New method may resolve difficulty in measuring universe's expansion

Astronomers have demonstrated how a combination of gravitational-wave and radio observations, along with theoretical modeling, can turn the mergers of pairs of neutron stars into a 'cosmic ruler' capable of measuring the expansion of the Universe and resolving an outstanding question over its rate.

Jul 8th, 2019

Methane vanishing on Mars: Researchers propose new mechanism as an explanation

Scientists have proposed a previously overlooked physical-chemical process that can explain the rapid disappearance of methane from Mars' atmosphere.

Jul 2nd, 2019

Radio telescope ALMA finds earliest example of merging galaxies

Researchers using ALMA observed signals of oxygen, carbon, and dust from a galaxy in the early Universe 13 billion years ago. This is the earliest galaxy where this useful combination of three signals has been detected.

Jul 1st, 2019

The first AI universe sim is fast and accurate - and its creators don't know how it works

The new model can envision universes with unique parameters, such as extra dark matter, even without receiving training data in which those parameters varied.

Jun 26th, 2019

Astronomers make first detection of polarised radio waves in Gamma Ray Burst jets

The polarisation signature reveals magnetic fields in the universe's most powerful explosions to be much more patchy and tangled than first thought.

Jun 19th, 2019

Astronomers investigate missing matter and the workings of the galactic ecosystem

Astronomers have investigated how galactic halos interact with the rest of their galaxies.

Jun 18th, 2019

Radically different telescope design offers deeper look into space

A radically different type of X-ray space telescope has been designed by scientists in Sweden, using advanced optic techniques that were originally developed in medical imaging research.

Jun 18th, 2019

New evidence shows crash with Antlia 2 gave the Milky Way the ripples in its outer disc

The newly-discovered dark dwarf galaxy Antlia 2's collision with the Milky Way may be responsible for our galaxy's characteristic ripples in its outer disc.

Jun 12th, 2019

Citizen scientists re-tune Hubble's galaxy classification

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have helped to overturn almost a century of galaxy classification, in a new study using data from the longstanding Galaxy Zoo project.

Jun 11th, 2019

A new candidate for dark matter and a way to detect it

Two theoretical physicists have a new candidate for dark matter and a possible way to detect it.

Jun 10th, 2019

Direct from distant planet: Spectral clues to puzzling paradox

Spectrographic analysis yields empirical benchmark for newborn 'hot Jupiter'.

Jun 10th, 2019

Fast and furious: detection of powerful winds driven by a supermassive black hole

This is the first publication based entirely on data obtained with EMIR, an instrument, which analyses the infrared light gathered by the Gran Telescopio Canarias.

Jun 7th, 2019