SPACE

Saturn hasn't always had rings

SPACE 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.

The orderly chaos of black holes

Researchers at UNIGE have discovered that photons emitted during the creation of a black hole appear to be disordered; within a single time slice they however appear to be highly ordered

Researchers unravel more mysteries of metallic hydrogen

Researchers unravel more mysteries of metallic hydrogen Metallic hydrogen is one of the rarest materials on Earth, yet more than 80 percent of planets--including Jupiter, Saturn, and hundreds of extrasolar planets--are composed of this exotic form of matter.

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