Space News & Blog Articles

Our red neighbour Mars, seems to experience many similar phenomena to Earth. It does however seem to lack the hurricanes and typhoons that lash Earth, but don’t underestimate the Martian winds. Over millions of years, these persistent atmospheric currents have carved spectacular grooves and ridges across the landscape, carrying sand grains like microscopic chisels to sculpt the surface. ESA’s Mars Express has now captured some of the most striking examples of this erosion near the planet’s equator.

The universe’s most massive galaxies present astronomers with a puzzle. Each containing more than 100 billion stars, making our Milky Way look modest by comparison, these ultramassive systems had already reached enormous sizes less than two billion years after the Big Bang. What astronomers couldn’t easily determine was whether these ancient giants were still actively building stars or had already shut down their stellar factories and retired into quiet old age.

Our Solar System, it turns out, is something of an oddball. While we have rocky planets close to the Sun and gas giants further out, most stars in the Milky Way harbour something entirely different. They are worlds between the sizes of Earth and Neptune and orbit closer to their stars than Mercury does to ours. These super Earths and sub Neptunes are the Galaxy’s most common planets, found around nearly every Sun like star ever have studied. Until now that is.

This is Part 4 in a series on the mathematical universe hypothesis. Check out Parts 1, 2, and 3.

It's a well-known fact that Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH) play a vital role in the evolution of galaxies. Their powerful gravity and the way it accelerates matter in its vicinity causes so much radiation to be released from the core region - aka. an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) - that it will periodically outshine all the stars in the disk combined. In addition, some SMBHs accelerate infalling dust and gas into jets that emanate from the poles, sending streams of super-heated material millions of light-years at close to the speed of light.

Warmer oceans are not good. Shallow, glib commentators might try to laugh it off, but their laughter reveals an infantile lack of seriousness in their thinking. Earth is one big, life-supporting system, and we know from the geological record that when the system falters, life pays the price.

Supernovae play a central role in the birth of new stars. They provide a rich source of gas and dust to form stellar nurseries, and their explosions can trigger shockwaves that trigger the birth of new stars. But it all depends on where supernovae occur. A supernova that happens within a dense cloud of gas will have a very different effect than one that occurs in a large void. Understanding these effects is a challenge. It is much easier to observe a supernova while it happens rather than long before or after. But a new radio study of the Andromeda Galaxy explores these interactions.

Stars are known for their stellar winds, streams of gas and charged particles from their upper atmospheres that collide with the interstellar medium. These winds can create bow shocks in the surrounding gas. But astronomers were surprised to find a bow shock near a white dwarf star, which are sometimes called dead stars or zombie stars.

All across the Universe, black holes devour stars that stray too close. Often it's a supermassive black hole that tears a star apart in what's known as a tidal disruption event. But sometimes, it's a stellar mass black hole, and its victim is its binary star partner.