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Light that traveled for more than 8.5 billion years to reach us was the last gasp of a dying star as a black hole swallowed it.
Two separate teams of scientists determined that a mysterious glimmer that appeared in the sky in February 2022, named AT2022cmc, was the astrophysical jet that erupted from the massive black hole as the shredded star vanished beyond its event horizon. It's incredibly rare for us to catch one of these meals in the act, and AT2022cmc is now the most distant we've ever seen.
An animation from the simulation shows our universe changing from a smooth, cold gas cloud to the lumpy scattering of galaxies and stars that we see today. It’s the most complete, detailed and accurate reproduction of the universe’s evolution yet produced, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
This virtual glimpse into the cosmos’s past is the result of CoDaIII, the third iteration of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which traces the history of the universe, beginning with the “cosmic dark ages” about 10 million years after the Big Bang. At that point, hot gas produced at the very beginning of time, about 13.8 billion years ago, had cooled to a featureless cloud devoid of light, says astronomer Paul Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin.
Radiation (blue) emanates from dense filaments of stars and galaxies (white) in this snapshot from a new simulation of the early universe.
A grammatical puzzle that has baffled scholars since the fifth century BCE has finally been solved.
Dr Rishi Rajpopat, an Indian PhD student at the University of Cambridge, has decoded a rule formulated by the ‘Father of Linguistics’ Panini.
This rule is a fundamental part of a simple grammatical system created by Pāṇini, called the ‘Language Machine’, intended to teach the sacred Sanskrit language of India.
Look deep enough into the darkness of space, you'll find all manner of shapes that stir the imagination. Keep staring, you'll quickly learn that our Universe can be so much stranger and more wondrous than anything the human mind can dream of.
A recent image released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has captured just a small glimpse of that on a cosmic scale: a dark nebula 7 light-years long looking like a titanic lighthouse keeping watch over the cold, black void of space. Perhaps it's a cyclopean giant seeking planets to devour. Or death itself, haunting the heavens, cloaked in shadow.
The new image of the Cone Nebula was released in celebration of 60 years of the European Southern Observatory collaboration
The ancient Romans were masters of building and engineering, perhaps most famously represented by the aqueducts. And those still functional marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable concrete that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.
Even today, one of their structures – the Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.
The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete.
But that, as it turns out, is not the whole story. An international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that not only are the materials slightly different from what we may have thought, but the techniques used to mix them were also different.
At the turn of the 21st century, astrophysicists opened a new and unexpected era for themselves: large-scale laboratory experimentation. High-powered machines, in particular some very large lasers, have provided ways to re-create the cosmos, allowing scientists like myself to explore some of the universe’s most dramatic environments in contained, controlled settings. Researchers have learned to explode mini supernovas in their labs, reproduce environments around newborn stars, and even probe the hearts of massive and potentially habitable exoplanets.
Egyptian archaeologists said they had discovered an 1,800-year-old "complete residential city from the Roman-era" in the heart of the southern city of Luxor.
The city, dating to the second and third centuries, is the "oldest and most important city found on the eastern bank of Luxor," according to Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Archaeologists discovered "a number of residential buildings" as well as "two pigeon towers" – a structure used to house pigeons or doves – and a "number of metal workshops," Waziri said in a statement.
Si tratta del primo caso al mondo in cui questo tema iconografico è stato trovato su un vetro dorato. La funzionaria archeologa della Soprintendenza speciale di Roma, Simona Morretta, descrive il reperto come “straordinariamente fine nella sua esecuzione”.
“Già un vetro dorato è un reperto molto raro – spiega all’Ansa – ma questo non ha confronto allo stato attuale degli studi. Non si era mai trovato un vetro dorato con la personificazione della città di Roma”.
A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we've ever seen in planetary science.
The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you're actually looking at is a planetary system.
The four dots are exoplanets, with the black disk obscuring their star, 133.3 light-years away from Earth. The partial circles are their orbital motions, a time-lapse compiled from 12 years of observations.
The Solar Orbiter watched Mercury as it crossed the face of its usual observing target, the sun. The transit of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun on Jan 3, 2023, offered the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft an opportunity to sharpen its view of the sun.
The black dot in this video sequence is the planet Mercury passing in front of the sun as seen by the Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. (Image credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team)
A clip of the X-class flare erupting from the sun on Feb. 17 followed by a 'solar tsunami' that is visible as a faint shockwave in the surrounding region.
In 2019, researchers announced that something appeared to be off with the sun. After 10 years of observations, they had concluded that the sun’s high-energy radiation was seven times more abundant than expected.
Now a new study based on even higher-energy data has sharpened the picture. Researchers found that the solar gamma-ray excess persists at higher energies. It then drops off at the topmost energies explored. No one can fully explain what’s going on. “It’s just been one fun head-scratcher after another,” said Annika Peter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University and a co-author of the latest analysis.
Byzantine earrings and an Islamic-style coin were found by a town key to Viking trade in Germany.
A trainee metal detectorist in northern Germany recently hit on something his mentor never expected: an 800-year-old hoard of gold jewelry and silver coins that hints at the area's trade connections.
Antarctic sea ice shrunk to a record low in February this year. Satellite measurements revealed that only 66% of the sea ice extent usually detected during the peak of the southern summer has been present in the waters surrounding the South Pole last month.
The growth and decrease in the amount of sea ice surrounding Antarctica throughout the year. (Image credit: NASA)
The Sun has been spitting out some pretty powerful eruptions in the last few weeks, but one that took place a few days ago is a real doozy.
On March 12, Sun-monitoring spacecraft recorded a huge amount of material blasting away from the far side of the Sun from a coronal mass ejection. Detected as an expanding cloud, or halo, of solar debris, it raced away from the Sun at exceptionally high speeds of 2,127 kilometers (1,321 miles) per second.
Most of the light streaming through the Universe is invisible to human eyes. Beyond the mid-range wavelengths we can see, there's a whole cosmos shining in high- and low-energy radiation.
But we humans are clever little animals and have managed to build instruments that can see the light we cannot. One of these is NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an observatory hanging out in low-Earth orbit, monitoring the sky for gamma rays, the highest-energy light in the Universe.
Looking to the stars for constellations that preside over birth and life has a long and complex history, and archaeologists have just uncovered a small piece of it.
A spectacular series of relief paintings on the ceiling of an ancient Egyptian temple depict 12 signs of the zodiac, and you might be surprised to recognize some of them.
In addition to the representations of the zodiac, the artworks restored in the magnificent Temple of Esna in Upper Egypt, dedicated to the ram-headed god Khnum and others, also include depictions of five of the planets in our Solar System, the "seven arrows" of Sekhmet, and some of the decans used to measure the hours of the night.
It's a rare find, and a beautiful one, joining a series of stunning and intricate nearly 2,000-year-old artworks adorning the temple walls.