Pulsars might transform dark matter into something we might see
Enlarge / Neutron stars may produce radio signals when interacting with dark matter. Dark matter is proving elusive. Apart from the gravitational evidence, which is strong, all the other potential indications of it haven't held up to scrutiny. One issue may be that we simply don’t know how to look for it, so detectors are…
No, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is not disintegrating, physicist claims
Enlarge / A dramatic view of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and its surroundings, courtesy of Voyager 1 on Feb. 25, 1979, when the spacecraft was 5.7 million miles (9.2 million kilometers) from Jupiter. Earlier this year, several amateur astronomers spotted an unusual anomaly on the planet Jupiter: bits of the gas giant's famed Great Red…
Finding stars that vanished—by scouring old photos
First you see it (top left) then you don't. Before the advent of digital imaging, astronomy was done using photographic plates. The results look a bit like biology experiments gone bad (of which I've perpetrated more than a few), with a sea of dark speckles of different intensities scattered randomly about. To separate the real…
When the Sun expands, it will trash all the asteroids
Despite its distance from the Sun, the asteroid belt will disintegrate as it expands. We tend to view the bodies of the Solar System as creations of gravity, which pulled their parts together and hold them in place as they orbit. But as we saw with ideas about the formation of Arrokoth, there are lots…
One Of These 4 Missions Will Be Chosen As NASA’s Subsequent...
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White dwarf causes strange relativity effect called frame dragging
Enlarge / The lit up rings in this image are caused by wobbles in a pulsar's axis of rotation. Ask about some mind-bending physics, and people will tend to focus on the many mind-bending oddities of quantum mechanics. But there's no shortage of strangeness in another one of physics' cornerstone theories: relativity. From time being…
Physicists identify unique signature to confirm quark-gluon plasma in Universe
Computer simulation of a merger between two dense neutron stars. After the merger, a phase transition from ordinary hadronic matter (red-yellow) to quark matter (green) takes place. In the first fractions of a second of our Universe's existence, the energy density was so incredibly high that there were no protons and neutrons, just a hot…
Physicists identify unique signature to confirm quark-gluon plasma in universe
Computer simulation of a merger between two dense neutron stars. After the merger, a phase transition from ordinary hadronic matter (red-yellow) to quark matter (green) takes place. In the first fractions of a second of our universe's existence, the energy density was so incredibly high that there were no protons and neutrons, just a hot…
Images obtained of two stars in the process of a merger
Enlarge / Some of the structures present in the area around the recently described star system. We know two facts about our galaxy that are, in isolation, mundane. One is that many stars are part of a two-star system and may orbit each other at distances similar to those of the planets in our own…
New analysis confirms hypothesis for source of mysterious auroral “dunes”
Revisiting the aurora "dunes": A time-lapse video recorded by a Scottish aurora borealis hobbyist Graeme Whipps was used to determine the speed of the phenomenon at over 200 m/s.Several years ago, amateur astronomers first spotted a rare type of aurora nicknamed "the dunes" because of its luminous, rolling wave patterns. Last year, astronomers proposed a…
