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Magazine
In the Feb. 16 SN: Robots roll into the classroom, brain zaps for severe depression, particle colliders of the future, how to walk like a tetrapod, sleepless nights boost Alzheimer's proteins and more.
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News
A cosmic flare called the ‘Cow’ may reveal a new way that stars die
01/14/2019 - 11:12 Cosmology, AstronomySEATTLE — Astronomers may have discovered a new way that stars can die. A mysteriously brief and bright burst whimsically called the “Cow” reveals an entirely new type of stellar death.
The details of that stellar doom, however, remain hazy. Scientists are still debating whether the flare-up, spotted on June 16, 2018, was from an unusual type of star that was eaten by a black hole, or...
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News
A second repeating fast radio burst has been tracked to a distant galaxy
01/09/2019 - 13:08 CosmologySEATTLE — Astronomers have spotted a second repeating fast radio burst, and it looks a lot like the first. The existence of a second repeating burst suggests there could be many more of the mysterious signals in the cosmos.
The burst, called FRB 180814.J0422+73, is one of 13 newly discovered fast radio bursts, or FRBs — brief, bright signals of radio energy that come from distant...
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News
Voyager 2 spacecraft enters interstellar space
12/10/2018 - 12:57 Cosmology, Particle PhysicsVoyager 2 has entered interstellar space. The spacecraft slipped out of the huge bubble of particles that encircles the solar system on November 5, becoming the second ever human-made craft to cross the heliosphere, or the boundary between the sun and the stars.
Coming in second place is no mean achievement. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to exit the solar system in 2012. But that...
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News
Astronomers find far-flung wind from a black hole in the universe’s first light
12/05/2018 - 06:00 Astronomy, CosmologyScientists have spotted wind from a supermassive black hole blowing at much greater distances than ever before.
Astronomer Mark Lacy and colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to observe the universe’s first light, and found evidence of gusts flowing from a type of black hole called a quasar. The wind extends about 228,000 light-years away from the galaxy that...
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News
Astronomers have measured all the starlight ever emitted
11/29/2018 - 14:00 Astronomy, CosmologyAstronomers have measured all the starlight that has managed to escape into space over the history of the universe.
It amounts to 4 x 1084 particles of light, or photons. That’s roughly equivalent to all the photons the sun would emit if it burned for 100 billion trillion years — long beyond the 5 billion years it has left. The universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old.
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News
Hints of Oort clouds around other stars may lurk in the universe’s first light
11/09/2018 - 06:00 Planetary Science, Exoplanets, CosmologyA thick sphere of icy debris known as the Oort cloud shrouds the solar system. Other star systems may harbor similar icy reservoirs, and those clouds may be visible in the universe’s oldest light, researchers report.
Astronomer Eric Baxter of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues looked for evidence of such exo-Oort clouds in maps of the cosmic microwave background, the cool...
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News
The universe’s continued existence implies extra dimensions are tiny
10/05/2018 - 16:34 Cosmology, Particle PhysicsThis could be the way the world ends.
First, a pair of cosmic protons smash together at unimaginable speeds. The tremendous energy of their crash would create a tiny, ephemeral black hole, so small that it would last just a fraction of a second before evaporating.
Where the black hole just was, a bubble of space with entirely different laws of physics than the universe we inhabit...
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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...