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Astronomers have discovered an uncommon star system located just 100 light-years away from us, with six planets huddled immensely close to their host star — so close, in fact, that all their orbits could fit within the distance between Mercury and our sun. Puzzlingly, unlike our own solar system, it appears this newfound slice of the cosmos has remained largely unchanged since its birth over a billion years ago.
Known as a "histamenon nomisma," this type of small coin was first introduced around A.D. 960. It shows Jesus holding a Bible on one side and the images of Basil II and Constantine VII, two brothers who both ruled the Byzantine Empire, on the other, according to a translated statement.
The western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in 476, while the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire, continued on for another millennium.
Now that several decades have passed since the launch of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, we look back on that time with a hazy sense of history and what the event meant for humanity’s ongoing odyssey. While the Voyager spacecraft were sober scientific missions, they also carried with them a hint of the deeper yearnings that lie inside humanity’s heart: the Golden Records.
The Voyager Golden Records were a message in a bottle to any other intelligent species out there that may stumble on them. While the odds are strongly stacked against that ever happening, the Records still served a purpose. They showed that we’re driven not only to understand the Universe but that we’re open to understanding other intelligences and that we desperately want to be understood ourselves. They also showed that we want to be unified with one another. The Golden Records are a verse of poetry among all the science.
The Sun has just belched out an absolute beast of a flare.
On 14 December, an active sunspot region named AR 3514 erupted in a class X2.8 solar flare, the most intense category of which our star is capable. The flare is the most powerful we've seen for the current solar cycle, and the most powerful since the X8.2 flare of September 2017.
The event produced a moderate radio blackout centered on South America, a temporary degradation or complete loss of radio signals in high frequencies, for two hours.
The X-class flare recorded by NASA's SDO on 14 December 2023. (NASA SDO)
Some enmities are so powerful, they could never be resolved. Bette and Joan. Batman and the Joker. Hamilton and Burr.
It was starting to look like that list would include general relativity and quantum theory, two mathematical frameworks for describing the Universe that just cannot be made to fit together.
But in new paper, physicist Jonathan Oppenheim of University College London claims to have found a way to resolve their differences.
A fantastical illustration of an experiment in which a heavy particle produces a quantum effect. (Isaac Young)
Diamonds seem to reach Earth's surface in massive volcanic eruptions when supercontinents break up, and they form when continents come together.
Diamonds erupt at the surface of the planet when supercontinents break up. Studying these sparkly gems can reveal secrets about our planet's deep history.(Image credit: Rory McNicol for Live Science)
In 2019, researchers released an image of the supermassive black hole known as M87*, which is 55 million light years away at the centre of galaxy M87. That image, the world’s first glimpse of a black hole, was taken by a network of radio observatories around the world called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), during its first observation run in 2017.
Now, the EHT collaboration has released a follow-up image of M87*, taken during a 2018 observation run that used an additional telescope in Greenland.
The light in the image isn’t coming out of the black hole because, as the name suggests, these objects don’t emit light. Instead, what you can see is the silhouette of the black hole at the centre of a mass of hot matter that the black hole is pulling inwards with its powerful gravity.
“This image is telling us the story that the black hole shadow is persistent, it is still there,” says EHT scientist Eduardo Ros. “We see that the ring is a beautiful circle. It’s very circular, it’s not an ellipse or something else. In this ring we also see an enhancement in the south, which is what we expected.”
The image on the right is our latest, and best, look at a black hole
A 500-foot-thick layer of pumice rock on the Mediterranean seabed indicates Santorini volcano ejected 15 times more material than Hunga-Tonga during a previously unknown eruption.
An illustration of the islands of the Greek archipelago of Santorini with the submarine volcano erupting.(Image credit: mikroman6 via Getty Images)
Sierra Space’s inflatable Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) modules meant to one day house astronauts orbiting Earth keep exploding—just as intended, and better than expected.
The private startup announced the results from its latest Ultimate Burst Pressure (UBP) test meant to help ensure the LIFE module’s eventual final design will withstand the vacuum of space, as well as handle any unwanted encounters with micrometeorites. To celebrate, Sierra Space released a mini documentary on the most recent trial run, highlighting the module’s complexities and progress.
If you thought you had a voracious appetite, you've got nothing on a newly discovered supermassive black hole.
The black hole at the center of a quasar galaxy called J0529-4351 is guzzling down so much material it basically swallows about a Sun's worth of gas and dust a day, onto a black hole that is already around 17 billion Suns' worth of mass.
Analyzing images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a group of astronomers led by Dr. Lukas Furtak and Prof. Adi Zitrin from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has detected an extremely red, gravitationally lensed supermassive black hole in the early universe. Its colors suggest that the black hole lies behind a thick veil of dust obscuring much of its light. The team managed to measure the black hole mass and discovered that it was significantly more massive, compared to its host galaxy, than what has been seen in more local examples.
Four coins dating back almost 1,900 years, to when the Jewish people launched a revolt against the Roman Empire, have been discovered in the Judaean desert.
The coins were found in the Mazuq Ha-he'teqim Nature Reserve, which is located in the West Bank. They date to the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt (A.D. 132 to 135), when the Jewish people rose up against the Roman Empire. Although the revolt had some initial success, the Romans' counterattack resulted in mass slaughter.
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A coin with an ancient Hebrew inscription on it that says "Eleazar the Priest."(Image credit: Emil Aladjem/Israel Antiquities Authority)
There's something peculiar about dying star Betelgeuse.
Yeah, there was the whole sneeze thing. That's been pretty much resolved for now. But before the Great Dimming Debacle of 2019, scientists spotted something even more peculiar about the giant star. Radio measurements of its changing light suggested it was rotating at 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) per second.
The big problem with that is that stars of Betelgeuse's vintage should, theoretically, have a maximum rotation speed at least two orders of magnitude lower. So, astronomers wonder, what the heck gives?
Excerpt from the March 16, 1974 issue of Science News
To create superconductors, physicists use diamond anvils (one shown) to crush materials at high pressures and ultracold temperatures. Researchers are searching for materials that can superconduct at ambient pressure and room temperature.
The map, assembled with data from the Gaia spacecraft, shows how the spread of dark matter across space matches that described by the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Each tiny dot in this three-dimensional representation of the Quaia catalog is a quasar. The split down the middle is where the plane of our Milky Way bisects the sky, blocking the view.(Image credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation; K. Storey-Fisher et al. 2023)
A recent X-class flare, which was split into two simultaneous explosions, launched a coronal mass ejection that smashed into Earth, triggering the most powerful disruption to our planet's magnetic field for more than six years.
A gigantic coronal mass ejection launched by a "double" X-class flare smashed into Earth on March 24 and triggered a powerful geomagnetic storm.(Image credit: NASA/SOHO)
