News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
An epic outburst from a baby star still in the process of forming has been captured in a spectacular Hubble image. Roughly 1,250 light-years away, in the Orion molecular cloud star-forming region, jets from a protostar are punching through the cloud at supersonic speeds, heating the gas and causing it to glow brightly. The result … Read more
Our planet is home to many radioactive substances—not just in its geologic innards or its weapons caches but also in its hospitals, at its industrial sites and in its food processing plants. In Colorado, for instance, 27 buildings house scary-sounding elements such as cesium 137, cobalt 60, americium 241 and iridium 192. These materials are … Read more
The catastrophic disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 was caused by an explosion at the Reactor 4 Unit. This expelled a sizeable quantity of radioactive material into the surroundings, alongside a partial meltdown of the reactor core. The last few decades have seen substantial international efforts to safely contain and decontaminate the … Read more
The Cambrian Explosion – around 541 million years ago – was when life and organisms really got going on planet Earth. Now new research has revealed how that explosion of life has left behind traces deep within Earth’s mantle. For scientists, it shows the connected interplay between Earth’s surface and what lies beneath, as … Read more
Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant and all the facilities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have been completely disconnected and are now without electricity, Ukraine’s state energy company has announced. Russian forces attacked the defunct nuclear facility on the very first day of the invasion (Feb. 24), seizing it after heavy fighting and taking its roughly 210 staff hostage, Live Science … Read more
Fluctuating light from a black hole, observed over 15 years, has revealed more about the way these enigmatic objects feed. First, a structure called a corona forms around the outside of the event horizon. Then, powerful jets of plasma launch from the poles, punching material from the corona out into interstellar space at speeds close … Read more
Two sets of giant bubbles that extend thousands of light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way could have been produced by the same event, in spite of their significant difference in size. They’re called the Fermi bubbles and the eROSITA bubbles, and astronomers believe they were the result of activity by … Read more
The smallest known main-sequence star in the Milky Way galaxy is a real pixie of a thing. It’s called EBLM J0555-57Ab, a red dwarf 600 light-years away. With a mean radius of around 59,000 kilometers, it’s just a smidge bigger than Saturn. That makes it the tiniest known star to support hydrogen fusion in its core, … Read more
There was a time, not so long ago, when computers were so large, they occupied entire rooms. Today, some processing units can come as small as a few specks of dust. Even next to a grain of rice, these stacks of micrometer-sized chips look infinitesimal. Shrinking computer batteries to fit that size, however, has proved … Read more
A strange X-ray glow seen in the sky three and a half years after an epic collision between two neutron stars is a first for science. According to astronomers studying the region of space, it could be the afterglow of the kilonova explosion that was generated by the merger, likely produced by a shock wave … Read more