SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
A new study spearheaded by Earth scientists at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geology and Mineralogy has constrained the age of the Moon to approximately 50 million years after the formation of the solar system. After the formation of the solar system, 4.56 billion years ago, the Moon formed approximately 4.51 billion years ago. … Read more
A new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison physicists mimicked solar winds in the lab, confirming how they develop and providing an Earth-bound model for the future study of solar physics. Our sun is essentially a big ball of hot plasma – an energetic state of matter made up of ionized gas. As the sun spins, … Read more
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has discovered three new worlds that are among the smallest, nearest exoplanets known to date. The planets orbit a star just 73 light years away and include a small, rocky super-Earth and two sub-Neptunes – planets about half the size of our own icy giant. The sub-Neptune furthest … Read more
Observations made with a new instrument developed for use at the 2.1-meter (84-inch) telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Kitt Peak National Observatory have led to the discovery of the fastest eclipsing white dwarf binary yet known. Clocking in with an orbital period of only 6.91 minutes, the rapidly orbiting stars are expected to be … Read more
Meteoroids coming from outer space are randomly shaped, but many of these, which land on earth as meteorites, are found to be carved into cones. Scientists have now figured out how the physics of flight in the atmosphere leads to this transformation. The progression, discovered through a series of replication experiments in New York University’s … Read more
People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would “yield ~10 s g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher … Read more
A team of researchers from Iran and the UK have obtained the first 3D map of the Local Bubble through a survey of diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs), a mysterious absorption feature seen in the stellar spectra, using two telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres. The solar systems is located in a very hot and … Read more
In a recent paper in Nature Astronomy, Nicola Tamanini from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and Camilla Danielski from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Saclay, Paris suggest how the planned space-based gravitational-wave observatory LISA can detect exoplanets orbiting white dwarf binaries everywhere in … Read more
Galaxies grow by accumulating gas from their surroundings and converting it to stars, but the details of this process have remained murky. New observations, made using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, now provide the clearest, most direct evidence yet that filaments of cool gas spiral into … Read more
The international research team including W. Fujiya (Faculty of Science, Ibaraki University), P. Hoppe (Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany), T. Ushikubo (Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology: JAMSTEC), and Y. Sano (Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo) estimated the amounts of dry ice … Read more