SPACE

Citizen scientist finds ancient white dwarf star encircled by puzzling rings

A volunteer working with the NASA-led Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project has found the oldest and coldest known white dwarf -- an Earth-sized remnant of a Sun-like star that has died -- ringed by dust and debris. Astronomers suspect this could be the first known white dwarf with multiple dust rings.

The Milky Way in a twist

Our Milky Way galaxy's disk of stars is anything but stable and flat. Instead, it becomes increasingly 'warped' and twisted far away from the Milky Way's center, according to astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

Hubble fortuitously discovers a new galaxy in the cosmic neighborhood

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away. The finding is reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

To catch a wave, rocket launches from top of world

On Jan. 4, 2019, at 4:37 a.m. EST the CAPER-2 mission launched from the Andøya Space Center in Andenes, Norway, on a 4-stage Black Brant XII sounding rocket. Reaching an apogee of 480 miles high before splashing down in the Arctic Sea, the rocket flew through active aurora borealis, or northern lights, to study the waves that accelerate electrons into our atmosphere.

NASA's NICER mission maps 'light echoes' of new black hole

Scientists have charted the environment surrounding a stellar-mass black hole that is 10 times the mass of the Sun using NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) payload aboard the International Space Station. NICER detected X-ray light from the recently discovered black hole, called MAXI J1820+070 (J1820 for short), as it consumed material from a companion star.

River levels tracked from space

Water levels in the Mekong basin, which extends through six countries in South-East Asia, are subject to considerable seasonal fluctuations. A new model now makes it possible to compute how water levels are impacted on various sections of the river by extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall or drought over extended periods.

Missing link in planet evolution found

For the first time ever, astronomers have detected a 1.3 km radius body at the edge of the solar system. Kilometer-sized bodies like the one discovered have been predicted to exist for more than 70 years.

Valuable insights as neutron star passed through stellar winds

Data recorded by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory of a neutron star as it passed through a dense patch of stellar wind emanating from its massive companion star provide valuable insight about the structure and composition of stellar winds and about the environment of the neutron star itself.

New detector fails to confirm would-be evidence of dark matter

Almost 20 years ago, the DAMA/LIBRA experiment operated at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory - LNGS began publishing data showing that it had detected a signal modulation produced by an interaction with the Milky Way's dark matter halo.

Saturn hasn't always had rings

In its last days, the Cassini spacecraft looped between Saturn and its rings so that Earth-based radio telescopes could track the gravitational tug of each. Scientists in Italy and the U.S. have now used these measurements to determine the mass of the rings and estimate its age, which is young: 10-100 million years. This supports the hypothesis that the rings are rubble from a comet or Kuiper Belt object captured late in Saturn's history.

From emergence to eruption: Comprehensive model captures life of a solar flare

A team of scientists has, for the first time, used a single, cohesive computer model to simulate the entire life cycle of a solar flare: from the buildup of energy thousands of kilometers below the solar surface, to the emergence of tangled magnetic field lines, to the explosive release of energy in a brilliant flash.
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