News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. In a new study, NASA’s NuSTAR space telescope spots the highest-energy light from Jupiter. (Image credit: Enhanced image by Kevin M. Gill (CC-BY) based on images provided courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS ) NASA has detected the most energetic light ever seen on Jupiter and, in the process, … Read more
What appears to be a teeny tiny alien world has just been found orbiting the Solar System’s closest stellar neighbor. The exoplanet candidate, named Proxima d, orbits a star named Proxima Centauri: a small, dim red dwarf star just 4.2 light-years from the Sun. Amazingly, the exoplanet is just a quarter of the mass … Read more
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
Light pollution is a big problem, and it’s getting bigger. Recently published research led by Dr Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel at the University of Exeter, UK suggests that a global rise in artificial lighting has substantially boosted light pollution levels over the past few decades – some regions have suffered as much as a fivefold increase! … Read more
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
Light traveling through a vacuum moves at exactly 299,792,458 meters (983,571,056 feet) per second. That’s about 186,282 miles per second — a universal constant known in equations and in shorthand as “c,” or the speed of light. According to physicist Albert Einstein‘s theory of special relativity, on which much of modern physics is based, nothing … Read more
Watch the sun set from a particularly dark patch of Earth and you may spot a triangle of what scientists call zodiacal light extending from where our star passed below the horizon. Zodiacal light in Earth’s skies is created when sunlight bounces off the dust that fills the solar system, the remains of pulverized asteroids … Read more
The ongoing volcanic eruption in Tonga began in December 2021, but it wasn’t until 5:15 pm local time on January 15, 2022, that the powerful explosion occurred. It generated an enormous cloud of ash, earthquakes, and tsunamis that reached as far as the distant coastlines of Peru on the other side of the Pacific. … Read more
New Year’s Day comes around once every 47.5 hours on the roughly Neptune-sized exoplanet TOI 674b, which makes it something of a rare creature. In spite of years of hunting, surprisingly few middle-sized gas giants have ever been seen with orbits shorter than a few days in length, creating what astronomers refer to as a … Read more
Stellar groupings orbiting in the outskirts of the Milky Way shed new light on the evolution of our galaxy as well as the elusive dark matter that surrounds it. Scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science mapped a dozen associations of stars that orbit within the gaseous halo that envelopes our galaxy, the Milky Way. … Read more