material

Cosmic detectives investigate the origins of Milky Way material

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By studying light from hundreds of thousands of stars in the Milky Way, scientists have revealed where the pieces that make up our galaxy came from.  In a new study, scientists broke the light coming from 600,000 stars into spectra that determine the stars’ chemical composition. In doing this, they were able to reveal which … Read more

Lunar Rover Discovers Mysterious Glass Spheres on The Far Side of The Moon

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China’s Yutu-2 mission has made another fascinating discovery on the far side of the Moon. Glistening amid the dry, gray dust, the rover’s panoramic camera picked out two small intact spheres of translucent glass.   Such spherules can record information about the Moon’s history, including the composition of its mantle and impact events. Yutu-2 was … Read more

Two New Studies Just Outlined The Basics of Building an Interstellar Light Sail

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For centuries, people have dreamed of being driven at speed across the vast oceans of space by winds of light. As whimsical as the idea sounds, nudging reflective sails slowly towards the speed of light using nothing more than the punch of photons might be our only plausible shot at reaching another star inside of … Read more

Sublime New Hubble Image Reveals a Thrilling Exchange Between Two Galaxies

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The ongoing interaction between two galaxies 320 million light-years away has been captured in a gorgeous Hubble image. They’re collectively known as Arp 282 in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, and they consist of a large barred spiral galaxy named NGC 169, about 140,000 light-years across, and a much smaller polar-ring galaxy named IC … Read more

Supercomputers Simulated a Black Hole And Found Something We’ve Never Seen Before

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While black holes might always be black, they do occasionally emit some intense bursts of light from just outside their event horizon. Previously, what exactly caused these flares had been a mystery to science.    That mystery was solved recently by a team of researchers that used a series of supercomputers to model the details of black holes‘ magnetic … Read more

We Have The First Direct Evidence of a White Dwarf Violently Ripping Apart a Planet

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Black holes may be well known for their gluttonous tendencies, but they’re not the only dead stars capable of slurping down passing objects. For years, evidence has been mounting that white dwarf stars also have a penchant for snacking – and on their own planets, no less.   Now, for the first time, astronomers have … Read more

Physicists Have Observed a Strange New Kind of Transition in Electronic Crystals

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As basic science teaches us, changes in temperature can result in phase transitions in materials – like when water solidifies as ice in the freezing cold. However, in some cases the temperature that triggers the change is different depending on whether the material is cooling down or warming up. This is known as a hysteresis … Read more

Even Dying Stars Could Give Birth to Brand New Planets, Says Study

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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

Breathtaking New Chandra Pics Show Cosmic Objects Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before

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Human vision may be limited to a specific range of wavelengths, but that doesn’t mean we’ll never understand the full complexity of light in our Universe. Instruments can peer into the cosmos in regimes that are otherwise invisible to our eyes, showing us not just the dynamics of the stars, but their absolutely awe-inspiring beauty. … Read more