Time again for a tale of things dark and mysterious. A tale of dark matter. It's a well-told tale, but this time it involves an interactive dance between dark matter and neutrinos.
One of the best things about being able to see thousands of exoplanetary systems is that we’re able to track them in different stages of development. Scientists still have so many questions about how planets form, and comparing notes between systems of different ages is one way to answer them. A new paper recently published in Nature by John Livingston of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his co-authors details one particularly interesting system, known as V1298, which is only around 30 million years old, and hosts an array of four “cotton candy” planets, which represent some of the earliest stages of planet formation yet seen.
This is Part 1 in a series on the mathematical universe hypothesis.
Black holes are objects so dense that they warp space time to an extreme degree. They may be better described as places than objects, but regardless, the point stands. So strong is their effect that not even light can esacpe their grasp.
The closest planet to the Sun is Mercury. It's a tiny world, even smaller than Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Ganymede. That's unusual for a planetary system. Most star systems have a large world between the size of Earth and Neptune orbiting much closer than Mercury. A new study has figured out how these close-orbiting super-Earths form and clues about why they are so common.
Mars has a curious past. Rovers have shown unequivocal evidence that liquid water existed on its surface, for probably at least 100 years. But climate models haven’t come up with how exactly that happened with what we currently understand about what the Martian climate was like back then. A new paper, published in the journal AGU Advances by Eleanor Moreland, a graduate student at Rice University, and her co-authors, has a potential explanation for what might have happened - liquid lakes on the Red Planet would have hid under small, seasonal ice sheets similar to the way they do in Antarctica on Earth.
It looks like NASA's Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission has come to a bureaucratic end. The mission was to be the crowning achievement in the study of Mars and all the questions surrounding its ancient habitability. But the US Congress has drastically cut the mission's funding.
In 1604, German astronomer Johannes Kepler spotted a new star in the sky that was so bright it could be seen during the daytime. The discovery, which Kepler described in his book *De Stella Nova*, caused quite a stir in the astronomical community. With this one point of light, astronomers questioned the prevailing dogma that the "firmament" (the background stars in the sky) was not unchanging and permanent. In time, we would come to realize that Kepler's Supernova (as it's come to be known) was a white dwarf that exceeded its critical mass and exploded in a brilliant burst.
So let’s say you set up an experiment to measure a quantum property of subatomic particles. Like, I don’t know, spin.
All of physics rests on causal determinism. It’s like…how we do physics. It IS physics.
Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa has emerged as a prime target in the search for life in our Solar System. Its frozen surface caps an ocean that contains more water than all of Earth's combined. Because it orbits the massive gas giant Jupiter, tidal heating keeps that ocean from freezing.
Dark Matter (DM) remains one of the most daunting mysteries for astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists. Six decades ago, the theory that the Universe was filled with mass that did not interact with normal matter in visible light became an accepted part of our cosmological models. And yet, all efforts to detect this mysterious matter in space or its constituent particles in a lab have produced null results. However, scientists have developed several promising methods that are helping them narrow the search for DM and measure its influence on the cosmos.
One of the critical aspects of exoplanet habitability is the long-term stability of the stars they orbit. Some stars are extremely massive and blast through their hydrogen fuel in only a few million years. Rigel, the blue supergiant in Orion, is an example of one of these. It will shine for only about 10 million years. That's not much time for life to arise on planets.
It feels like every time we publish an article about an exciting discovery of a potential biosignature on a new exoplanet, we have to publish a follow-up one a few months later debunking the original claims. That is exactly how science is supposed to work, and part of our job as science journalists is to report on the debunking as well as the original story, even if it might not be as exciting. In this particular case, it seems the discovery of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18 b was a false alarm, according to a new paper available in pre-print form on arXiv by Luis Welbanks of Arizona State University and his co-authors.
This is Part 1 in a series on the physics of free will.
Gravitational Lensing is a vital tool for astronomers to observe objects that are too distant or faint (or both) to be resolved by current instruments. This method leverages a prediction from Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, namely that massive objects alter the curvature of spacetime. When a "lens" comes into view, its gravitational field bends and amplifies light from more distant objects. In a recent study, a team of astronomers used a combination of ground-based telescopes to discover the first spatially resolved, gravitationally lensed supernova.
The platypus is one of evolution's loveable, oddball animals. The creature seems to defy well-understood rules of biology by combining physical traits in a bizarre way. They're egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver-like tails, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind feet. In that regard, it's only fitting that astronomers describe some newly-discovered oddball objects as 'Astronomy's Platypus.'
We may not know what dark matter is, but that hasn't stopped scientists from trying to understand its role in the Universe. The Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model is the standard model that explains the cosmos the best, although it's not the only model. It makes a number of predictions about dark matter and researchers look for opportunities to test those predictions. The results either help confirm or deny the model.
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