Category: Science

Multiple solar storms and a “dark flare” led to the formation of a “cannibal” cloud This gas ejection is quite rare and can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth It is quite common for the Earth to be struck by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that have erupted from the sun. But what is less familiar to...

It’s easy to think of Earth as a water world, with its vast oceans and beautiful lakes, but compared to many worlds, Earth is particularly wet. Even the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn have much more liquid water than Earth. Earth is unusual not because it has liquid water, but because it has liquid...

The first generation of stars in the universe is yet to be observed. There are two leading theories about these objects: hydrogen-burning Population III stars and the so-calleddark stars,” made of hydrogen and helium, but powered by dark matter heating rather than nuclear fusion. New research shows that JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0 and JADES-GS-z11-0, three high-redshift candidate...

A presented a recent study at the National Astronomy Meeting 2023 (NAM2023) examines a newly discovered theory of planet formation that challenges previous ideas about how planets form in the disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars, also known as protoplanetary disks. As well as being presented at NAM2023, the research has also been...

The Aeolus satellite has been orbiting the planet at an altitude of 200 miles for five years, but now its fuel is nearly exhausted and gravity, bits of Earth’s atmosphere and solar activity are pulling it back down. A defunct spacecraft the size of a small car is expected to fall to Earth within weeks,...

The concept of harvesting some of the unlimited sunlight available in space, then beaming it down to consumers, was first developed to serve the clean energy needs of planet Earth. But space solar might work for the moon, too. As part of the ESA Open Space Innovation Platform campaign on “Clean energy – new ideas...

Follow Euclid on its journey to the L2 Lagrange point and find out how mission controllers at ESOC in Darmstadt continue to power-up, check and calibrate the spacecraft’s equipment, telescope and science instruments as they prepare for routine science observations. July 11-12. Wake up the VIS The VIS control electronics were turned on (primary and...

Observing gravitational waves from merging black holes could provide new insights into the nature of dark matter, researchers have revealed, according to findings presented at the National Astronomical Meeting in 2023. The international team used computer simulations to investigate the generation of signals from gravitational waves in simulated universes with different types of dark matter....

Data from ESA’s Cheops exoplanet mission led to the surprising discovery that an ultra-hot exoplanet that orbits its host star in less than a day is covered in reflective clouds of metal, making it the brightest exoplanet ever discovered . Exoplanet LTT9779 b in orbit around its star Besides the Moon, the brightest object in...