News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The planet-scale array of observatories most famous for creating the first-ever image of a black hole is heading back to work. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is gearing up for its 2022 campaign, which includes seven days of remote observations. The telescope network will focus on dramatic objects around the universe including black holes, galaxies … Read more
Prehistoric sites are full of stone tools that appear to have two life cycles: They’ve been crafted, used, and discarded before being picked up a second time and used again. A new study puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why this is. The research suggests that the recycling of these tools is about … Read more
Pluto may no longer be a planet, but the dwarf planet and its icy neighbors in the Kuiper Belt are about to enter the spotlight. One of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s first missions this year will be a program to study Pluto and some of the thousands of other celestial objects in the Kuiper … Read more
A camouflage system made using algae and tree bark can hide objects from both visible and infrared light Environment 3 March 2022 By Alex Wilkins A photograph of the patterned foam Laaksonen etal. (2022) Camouflage made from biodegradable foams of algae and cellulose derived from wood pulp or tree bark could make objects in forests … Read more
What astronomers had concluded to be a black hole a mere 1,120 light-years from Earth instead appears to be something quite different: a two-star system where one of the stars is sucking the life out of the other. Far from disappointing, though, the conclusion gives astronomers an exciting opportunity to explore how these ‘vampiric’ stars … Read more
Millions of new objects have just been cataloged in a vast new sky map that will lead to more investigations about our universe’s environment, the discovery team says. A map of roughly one-quarter of the northern sky was generated using a pan-European set of telescopes called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). It detected objects that … Read more
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
The night sky is filled with blips and flashes, a constantly changing sea of lights. Some of these changes are from Earth-bound happenings such as aircraft flying overhead, but some are from distant sources in space. Astronomers hunt for these fleeting phenomena, known as astronomical transients, by observing the sky regularly and looking for differences … Read more
A Stonehenge-era chalk drum is the “most important piece of prehistoric art to be found in Britain in the last 100 years,” according to the British Museum. The 5,000-year-old drum, discovered within an ancient children’s burial site, is to go on display for the first time next week, per CNN. It will be unveiled, six … Read more
The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, identified in 2021, is officially the biggest comet ever observed. The new record, reported on the preprint website arXiv and now accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, bumps the Hale-Bopp comet from the top spot. Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995 and became visible to the naked eye in 1996; it … Read more