News by Subject Space & Planetary

A team of astronomers observed six mild-mannered LINER galaxies suddenly and surprisingly transforming into ravenous quasars -- home to the brightest of all active galactic nuclei. The team's observations could help demystify the nature of both LINERs and quasars while answering some burning questions about galactic evolution. Based on their analysis, the researchers suggest they have discovered an entirely new type of black hole activity at the centers of these six LINER galaxies.

A team of physicists and computer scientists at ETH Zurich has developed a new approach to the problem of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. Using machine learning tools, they programmed computers to teach themselves how to extract the relevant information from maps of the universe.

About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth's poles, and new species evolved with the new temperatures. The cause of this ice age was a mystery, until now: a new study in Science Advances argues that the ice age was caused by global cooling, triggered by extra dust in the atmosphere from a giant asteroid collision in outer space.

Moving through cosmic forests and spider webs in deep space in search of answers on the origin of the Cosmos. 'We have tested a scenario in which dark matter is composed by non-stellar black holes, formed in the primordial Universe,' says Riccardo Murgia, lead author of the study published in Physical Review Letters. The research was carried out together with his colleagues Giulio Scelfo and Matteo Viel of SISSA and INFN and Alvise Raccanelli of CERN.

The overall brightness of Tabby's Star has been gradually dimming for years. A new Columbia study suggests chunks of an exomoon's dusty outer layers of ice, gas and carbonaceous rock may be accumulating in a disk, blocking the star's light and making it appear to slowly fade.

West Virginia University researchers have helped discover the most massive neutron star to date, a breakthrough uncovered through the Green Bank Telescope. The neutron star, called J0740+6620, is a rapidly spinning pulsar that packs 2.17 times the mass of the sun (which is 333,000 times the mass of the Earth) into a sphere only 20-30 kilometers, or about 15 miles, across.

Astronomers using the GBT have discovered the most massive neutron star to date, a rapidly spinning pulsar approximately 4,600 light-years from Earth. This record-breaking object is teetering on the edge of existence, approaching the theoretical maximum mass possible for a neutron star.

Star clusters are formed by the condensation of molecular clouds. An international team led by UNIGE has been able to detect molecular clouds in a Milky Way progenitor, thanks to the unprecedented spatial resolution achieved in such a distant galaxy. These observations show that the distant clouds have a higher mass, density and internal turbulence than the clouds hosted in nearby galaxies and that they produce far more stars.