News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk will have a nice visual aid to point to during his highly anticipated Starship presentation on Thursday (Feb. 10). That talk is an update about Starship, the giant vehicle that SpaceX is developing to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and beyond. Starship consists of two fully … Read more
It will soon be time to bid a fond adieu to an object that has been a fixture in our evening sky since late last summer: the planet Jupiter. Jupiter is leaving our skies after many months of an impressive display. Currently it’s setting just under two hours after the sun and you can still … Read more
When young stars coalesce out of a cloud of molecular hydrogen, a disk of leftover material called a protoplanetary disk surrounds them. This disk is where planets form, and astronomers are getting better at peering into those veiled environments and watching embryonic worlds take shape. But young stars aren’t the only stars with disks of … Read more
Tick … tick … boom? In the center of a galaxy 1.2 billion light-years from Earth, astronomers say they have seen signs that two giant black holes, with a combined mass of hundreds of millions of Suns, are gearing up for a cataclysmic merger as soon as 100 days from now. The event, if it … Read more
Conservationists have used artificial insemination to help grow giant panda populations, but data from decades of births show that panda mothers are less likely to care for cubs born this way Life 28 January 2022 By Sophie Freeman A female giant panda at the Bifengxia Panda Base in China Imaginechina Limited/Alamy Giant pandas that become … Read more
This image from CaSSIS aboard the ExoMars TGO reveals an impact crater on Mars that looks like a tree stump. (Image credit: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) A Mars probe has snapped a peculiar image of the Red Planet’s surface that looks like a giant tree stump, rings and all. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter … Read more
A red giant is a dying star in the final stages of stellar evolution. In about five billion years, our own sun will turn into a red giant, expand and engulf the inner planets — possibly even Earth. What does the future hold for the light of our solar system and others like it? Star … Read more
This visualization shows the Local Bubble with star formation happening on its surface. (Image credit: Leah Hustak (STScI)) Earth is surrounded by a vast bubble about 1,000 light-years wide whose borders drive the formation of all nearby young stars, a new study finds. For decades, astronomers have known the solar system lies within the so-called … Read more
The Solar System floats in the middle of a peculiarly empty region of space. This region of low-density, high-temperature plasma, about 1,000 light-years across, is surrounded by a shell of cooler, denser neutral gas and dust. It’s called the Local Bubble, and precisely how and why it came to exist, with the Solar System floating … Read more
An astonishing fossil of an extinct ‘sea dragon’ discovered by a wetland conservationist one day at work has been hailed as the largest and most complete fossil of its kind ever found in Britain. The fossil, identified as an ichthyosaur, an ancient marine reptile that swam in Earth’s prehistoric oceans when dinosaurs walked on … Read more