Continuing the Apollo legacy: Study shows that the Moon is older than previously believed

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

Fastest eclipsing binary, a valuable target for gravitational wave studies

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

What gives meteorites their shape? New research uncovers a ‘Goldilocks’ answer

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

A material way to make Mars habitable

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

Mystery material found on our doorstep

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

Discovering exoplanets with gravitational waves

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

Spiraling filaments feed young galaxies

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

Laboratory analysis of meteorites have shown evidence that asteroids migrated towards the asteroid belt from the outer solar system

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