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Magazine
In the Sept. 29 SN: Tomorrow’s burger, inside three big physics experiments, enterovirus outbreak patterns, Jupiter’s wacky magnetism, crop pests like it warm, firefly flashing methods and more.
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Feature
The ecosystem that controls a galaxy’s future is coming into focus
07/12/2018 - 07:00 Astronomy, CosmologyThere’s more to a galaxy than meets the eye. Galaxies’ bright stars seem to spiral serenely against the dark backdrop of space. But a more careful look reveals a whole lot of mayhem.
“Galaxies are just like you and me,” Jessica Werk, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “They live their lives in a...
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Mystery Solved
On Jupiter, lightning flashes from storms swirling at the poles
06/19/2018 - 12:00 Astronomy, Cosmology, Planetary ScienceWhen Voyager 1 revealed lightning on Jupiter in 1979, something about the flashes didn’t make sense. From a distance, it seemed like the radio waves from the massive planet’s lightning bolts didn’t reach the high frequency emitted by lightning on Earth.
But the Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting much closer to Jupiter’s surface for the last two years, has helped solve the mystery...
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News in Brief
These stars may have been born only 250 million years after the Big Bang
05/16/2018 - 13:00 Cosmology, AstronomyA measly 250 million years after the Big Bang, in a galaxy far, far away, what may be some of the first stars in the universe began to twinkle. If today’s 13.8-billion-year-old universe is in middle age, it would have been just starting to crawl when these stars were born.
Researchers used instruments at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observatory in Chile to observe...
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News
A DIY take on the early universe may reveal cosmic secrets
04/27/2018 - 16:45 Physics, CosmologyA DIY universe mimics the physics of the infant cosmos, a team of physicists reports. The researchers hope to use their homemade cosmic analog to help explain the first instants of the universe’s 13.8-billion-year life.
For their stand-in, the scientists created a Bose-Einstein condensate — a state of matter in which atoms are chilled until they all take on the same quantum state. Shaped...
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News
The search for mysterious dark matter underdogs steps up
04/09/2018 - 11:00 Particle Physics, CosmologyScientists playing peekaboo with dark matter have entered a new stage of the game.
For the first time, physicists are snooping on some of the likeliest hiding places for hypothetical subatomic particles called axions, which could make up dark matter. So far, no traces of the particles have been found, scientists with the Axion Dark Matter Experiment, ADMX, report April 9 in Physical...
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News in Brief
Dark matter isn’t interacting with itself after all
04/05/2018 - 19:05 Astronomy, CosmologyDark matter is still the shyest particle in physics. New observations show that dark matter in galaxy cluster Abell 3827 stubbornly ignores all other kinds of matter — including itself, astronomers reported April 6 at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool, England.
The research, also posted online at arXiv.org, negates an earlier finding that stars were separated...
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Reviews & Previews
Why the Nobel Prize might need a makeover
04/02/2018 - 09:00 Cosmology, History of Science, AstronomyLosing the Nobel PrizeBrian KeatingW.W. Norton & Co., $27.95
Dust may seem insignificant, but in science, it can cost you a Nobel Prize.
That’s what happened to Brian Keating, a major contributor to the BICEP2 team that claimed in 2014 to have found the first definitive evidence of cosmic inflation (SN: 4/5/14, p. 6), a period of extremely rapid expansion just after the...
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News
Dark matter is MIA in this strange galaxy
03/28/2018 - 13:00 Astronomy, Particle Physics, CosmologyMISSING: Dark matter.
Mass: About 60 billion suns’ worth.
Location: The galaxy NGC1052–DF2, about 65 million light-years from Earth.
An unusual galaxy is surprisingly lacking in dark matter, scientists report March 28 in Nature.
In typical galaxies, normal matter is swamped by dark matter, an unidentified invisible substance that makes up most of the matter in the...
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News in Brief
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76
03/14/2018 - 10:06 Cosmology, PhysicsPhysicist Stephen Hawking, a black hole whisperer who divined secrets of the universe’s most inscrutable objects, died March 14 at age 76. In addition to his scientific research, Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, was known for his popular science books, including the best-selling A Brief History of Time, which captivated readers with lucid explanations of the universe’s...
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News
Here’s when the universe’s first stars may have been born
02/28/2018 - 13:00 Cosmology, AstronomyFor the first time, scientists may have detected hints of the universe’s primordial sunrise, when the first twinkles of starlight appeared in the cosmos.
Stars began illuminating the heavens by about 180 million years after the universe was born, researchers report in the March 1 Nature. This “cosmic dawn” left its mark on the hydrogen gas that surrounded the stars (SN: 6/8/02, p. 362...