Phys.org – Astronomy

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers has inspected an icy protoplanetary disk of a young star known as PDS 453. Results of the new study, published on the preprint server […]

The chances of intelligent life emerging in our universe—and in any hypothetical ones beyond it—can be estimated by a new theoretical model which has echoes of the famous Drake Equation.This post was originally published on […]

On 12 November 2014, after a 10-year journey through the solar system and over 500 million kilometers from home, Rosetta’s lander Philae made space exploration history by touching down on a comet for the first […]

A Southwest Research Institute-led team combined compositional data of primitive bodies like Kuiper Belt objects, asteroids and comets with new solar data sets to develop a revised solar composition that potentially reconciles spectroscopy and helioseismology […]

The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis […]

Astronomers have performed a comprehensive multiwavelength study of an extremely variable blazar known as AO 0235+164. Results of the new study, published Nov. 3 on the preprint server arXiv, shed more light on the long-term […]

“Killer electrons” that travel at nearly light speed inside Earth’s Van Allen belts—the zone that surrounds the planet and traps energetic charged particles—pose a major threat to equipment in space by causing malfunctions in electronics.This […]

Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental physical process in plasmas, through which the magnetic energy is converted into plasma kinetic energy and thermal energy rapidly. Current sheets in turbulent plasma are the key trigger for magnetic […]

Like the Earth, the sun likely has swirling polar vortices, according to new research led by the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR). But unlike on Earth, the formation and […]

Deep within the Orion Nebula, researchers are one step closer to understanding how Jupiter-mass binary objects (JuMBOs) form—a longstanding mystery in astrophysicsThis post was originally published on this site