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.
The present-day surface of Mars is relatively well characterized, but the details of its evolution and internal structure remain, in comparison, poorly known. Evidence for recent volcanic activity suggests that Mars’ deep interior remains hot and convectively cooling. Mars’ cooling rate is related to its early thermal state, and to its rheology that determines its … Read more
Star formation within interstellar gas clouds proceeds very rapidly, yet highly inefficiently. Most of the gas is quickly dispersed by stellar radiation, revealing galaxies to be highly dynamic systems, like “cosmic cauldrons”, consisting of building blocks that constantly change their appearance. A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Dr. Diederik Kruijssen from Heidelberg University has … Read more
Through an experiment designed to create a super-cold state of water, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron scattering to discover a pathway to the unexpected formation of dense, crystalline phases of ice thought to exist beyond Earth’s limits. Observation of these particular crystalline ice phases, known as ice IX, … Read more
Computer simulations provide compelling evidence that an insulating layer of gas hydrates could keep a subsurface ocean from freezing beneath Pluto’s icy exterior, according to a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. [rand_post] In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew through Pluto’s system, providing the first-ever close-up images of this distant dwarf planet and … Read more
The Earth is unique in our solar system: It is the only terrestrial planet with a large amount of water and a relatively large moon, which stabilizes the Earth’s axis. Both were essential for Earth to develop life. Planetologists at the University of Münster have now been able to show, for the first time, that … Read more
On 1 January 2019, the New Horizons Spacecraft conducted a flyby of (486958) 2014 MU69 – a distant object orbiting in the outer reaches of the Solar System. In a new report, Alan Stern and colleagues present the first results from the flyby, showing that MU69 is an ancient relic that has remained largely untouched – even … Read more
Thousands of young cliff-like, fault scarps detected in images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) are evidence of a shrinking moon and recently active lunar faults. But just how recently these faults were active was not known. The Apollo astronauts placed seismometers on the moon that recorded shallow moonquakes, but the source of … Read more
A team led by researchers of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB, UB-IEEC) and the Besançon Astronomical Observatory have found, analysing data from the Gaia satellite, that a severe star formation burst occurred in the Milky Way about to and three thousand million years ago. In this process, more than … Read more
It is believed that the formation and growth of most galaxies across the history of the universe have been fueled by black holes nested in their very centre. These have been growing together with their host galaxy as they collect matter up to attain millions of solar masses. Chasing the early stages of these extreme … Read more
Astronomers have just managed to take the first image of a black hole, and now the next challenge facing them is how to take even sharper images, so that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity can be tested. Radboud University astronomers, along with the European Space Agency (ESA) and others, are putting forward a concept for … Read more