AUSTIN, Texas — Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University have put a basic principle of black holes to the test, showing that matter completely vanishes when pulled in. Their results constitute another successful test for Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. (more…)
A pioneering new study has shown that water found on Earth predates the formation of the sun – raising hopes that life could exist on exoplanets, the planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy.
The ground-breaking research set out to discover the origin of the water that was deposited on the Earth as it formed.
It found that a significant fraction of water found on Earth, and across our solar system, predates the formation of the sun. By showing that water is ‘inherited’ from the environment when a star is born, the international team of scientists believe other exoplanetary systems also had access to an abundance of water during their own formation. (more…)
Brown University cognitive scientists have identified specific brain regions that work together to allow us to choose from among the options we store in working memory. Findings appear in the journal Neuron.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Keep this in mind: Scientists say they’ve learned how your brain plucks information out of working memory when you decide to act. (more…)
Look up at the night sky and you’ll see stars, sure. But the sky is also filled with planets — billions and billions of them at least.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm. The team made their estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32 — planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority of planets in our galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most of these worlds form. (more…)
A new atlas and catalog of the entire infrared sky with more than a half-billion stars, galaxies and other objects captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission was unveiled by NASA Wednesday.
“Today WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community,” said Edward L. (Ned) Wright, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and the mission’s principal investigator, who began working on the mission in 1998. (more…)
SAN FRANCISCO – A planet made of diamonds may sound lovely, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
A new study suggests that some stars in the Milky Way could harbor “carbon super-Earths” – giant terrestrial planets that contain up to 50 percent diamond.
But if they exist, those planets are likely devoid of life as we know it. (more…)
*One youngster only six times heftier than Jupiter*
TORONTO, ON – A University of Toronto-led team of astronomers has discovered over two dozen new free-floating brown dwarfs, including a lightweight youngster only about six times heftier than Jupiter, that reside in two young star clusters. What’s more, one cluster contains a surprising surplus of them, harbouring half as many of these astronomical oddballs as normal stars.
“Our findings suggest once again that objects not much bigger than Jupiter could form the same way as stars do. In other words, nature appears to have more than one trick up its sleeve for producing planetary mass objects,” says Professor Ray Jayawardhana, Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and leader of the international team that made the discovery. (more…)
Brian P. Schmidt, who graduated from the UA in 1989 with a double major in astronomy and physics, shares this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics with two colleagues for a discovery that has rocked our understanding of the cosmos: The universe is expanding at an ever-faster pace.
In the last years of the 20th century, two teams of researchers set out to race each other to measure the rate of the universe’s expansion, and by extension, unveil how the universe most likely will end. (more…)
