News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

A new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests helped scientists discover billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and lays the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics Pune, and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, has used the upgraded GMRT to measure the atomic hydrogen content of galaxies 8 billion years ago. This is the earliest epoch in the universe for which there is a measurement of the atomic gas content of galaxies. This research has been published in the 14 October 2020 issue of the journal Nature.

Star clusters have been part of the Imaginarium of human civilization for millennia. The brightest star clusters to Earth, like the Pleiades, are readily visible to the naked eye. A team around astronomer Stefan Meingast at the University of Vienna has now revealed the existence of massive stellar halos, termed coronae, surrounding local star clusters. The paper was published in "Astronomy & Astrophysics".

Simulations show it's possible to distinguish host galaxy from quasars, although still challenging due to the galaxy's small size on the sky.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have proposed a novel method for finding dark matter, the cosmos' mystery material that has eluded detection for decades.

At present, the formation of galaxies is difficult to understand without the presence of a ubiquitous, but mysterious component, termed dark matter. Astronomers have measure how much dark matter there is around galaxies, and have found that it varies between 10 and 300 times the quantity of visible matter. However, a few years ago, the discovery of a very diffuse object, named Dragonfly 44, changed this view.

New research is helping to explain one of the big questions that has perplexed astrophysicists for the past 30 years - what causes the changing brightness of distant stars called magnetars. Magnetars were formed from stellar explosions or supernovae and they have extremely strong magnetic fields, estimated to be around 100 million, million times greater than the magnetic field found on earth.

An international research team led by Assoc. Prof. ZHAO Yuhui from the Purple Mountain Observatory has built and applied a mass-loss-driven shape evolution model (MONET) and suggested that the current flattened shape of Arrokoth could be of evolutionary origin due to volatile outgassing in a timescale of about 1-100 Myr, which provides a natural explanation for the flattening shape of the body.

New research shows that sunspots and other active regions can change the overall solar emissions. The sunspots cause some emissions to dim and others to brighten; the timing of the changes also varies between different types of emissions. This knowledge will help astronomers characterize the conditions of stars, which has important implications for finding exoplanets around those stars.