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Enigmatic High-Energy X-Rays Have Been Spied Coming From Jupiter

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Jupiter has finally been observed spitting out X-rays in high-energy wavelengths. Emanating from the giant planet’s permanent auroras, and detected by NASA’s space-based X-ray telescope NuSTAR, the emissions are the most energetic light seen coming from any planet in the Solar System (aside from Earth).   The detection could shed light on the most powerful … Read more

For The First Time, a Lone Black Hole Has Been Found Wandering The Milky Way

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Like an ancient cardigan, the Milky Way should be absolutely riddled with black holes. According to our best estimates, there should be as many as 10 million to 1 billion stellar-mass black holes out there, drifting peacefully and quietly through the galaxy. There’s just one problem when it comes to counting them: Unless they manage … Read more

Biden’s ‘reignited’ Cancer Moonshot would develop blood tests to detect cancer and vaccines to prevent it | Science

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To scientists’ relief, the “reignited” Cancer Moonshot to be formally announced today by President Joe Biden will not offer an unrealistic deadline for wiping out cancer. It instead sets a long-term goal of gradually reducing cancer deaths. The plan would focus research in several areas, including preventive vaccines and blood tests that screen for multiple … Read more

Astronomers detect powerful cosmic object unlike anything they’ve seen before

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Astronomers have discovered a mysterious, flickering object in our galaxy, the Milky Way, that belches enormous amounts of energy toward Earth three times an hour.  This strangely powerful object — located about 4,000 light-years from the sun — is unlike any cosmic structure ever observed, researchers wrote in a statement.  The object in question — named GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3 (but … Read more

Astronomers Detect Strange Signals We’ve Never Seen Before in Our Cosmic Vicinity

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Something in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood is emitting weird signals of a kind we’ve never seen before. Just 4,000 light-years away, something is flashing radio waves. For roughly 30 to 60 seconds, every 18.18 minutes, it pulses brightly, one of the most luminous objects in the low-frequency radio sky. It matches the profile of no known … Read more

Astronomers Detect Rare ‘Missing Link’ Black Hole in Our Closest Galactic Neighbor

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A rare treasure that could shed light on the evolution of black holes has been discovered in the Milky Way’s closest large galactic neighbor. In a cluster of stars in the Andromeda galaxy, aka M31, astronomers studied changes in light to identify a black hole clocking in at almost 100,000 times the mass of the … Read more

Physicists Detect Mysterious X Particles in ‘Primordial Soup’ For The First Time

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A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the ‘primordial soup’. Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed … Read more

Researchers detect 1st merger between black holes with eccentric orbits

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Scientists have for the first time confirmed the merger of two highly eccentric black holes.  Egg-shaped eccentric orbits form when two black holes spiral towards each other and collide under each other’s strong gravitational influence. Therefore, highly eccentric orbits may suggest black holes repeatedly snack on other black holes in densely populated areas, like the … Read more

For The First Time, Astronomers Detect Rugby-Ball Shape of a Deformed Exoplanet

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Beyond the Solar System, out there in the wider galaxy, a very strange subset of exoplanets exists. Called hot Jupiters, these are majorly clingy – hugging so close to their host stars, they’re not just intensely hot, but also likely warped by gravitational forces.   Now, for the first time, astronomers have actually detected the … Read more