Researchers announced on Feb. 22 the stunning discovery of seven Earth-like planets orbiting a small star in our galaxy, opening up the most promising hunting ground so far for life beyond the Solar System. All seven roughly match the size and mass of our own planet and are almost certainly rocky, and three are perfectly perched to harbour life-nurturing oceans of water, they reported in the journal Nature.
Category: Astronomy
A Year Since Gravitational Waves Were Discovered: – Preferred’ for…
Building the world’s third Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave observatory is an ambitious task, one that scientists are excited about. But they want to make sure that the ‘primary’ site at Maharashtra’s Hingoli district is the best location to help filter noise and interpret signals better.
Fast radio burst tied to distant dwarf galaxy, and perhaps magnetar
Fast radio bursts, which flash for just a few milliseconds, created a stir among astronomers because they seemed to be coming from outside our galaxy, which means they would have to be very powerful to be seen from Earth, and because none of those first observed were ever seen again. A repeating burst was discovered in 2012, however, providing an opportunity for a team of researchers to repeatedly monitor its area of the sky with the Karl Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico, in hopes of pinpointing its location.
The Mystery of Part-Time Pulsars
A new discovery has upended the widely held view that all pulsars are orderly ticking clocks of the universe. A survey done at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has fortuitously discovered two extremely strange pulsars that undergo a “cosmic vanishing act.”
Gemini: exploring a fast radio burst in 3 dimensions
Gemini composite image of the field around FRB 121102 . The dwarf host galaxy was imaged, and spectroscopy performed, using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea in Hawai’i.
Flying observatory makes observations of Jupiter previously only possible from space
Jupiter was observed with SOFIA by stepping the FORCAST spectroscopic slit across the planet. The left-hand panel shows a visible-light image of Jupiter with blue rectangles illustrating the orientation and size of the FORCAST slit.
15 amazing things humans discovered in 2016
While various pundits have claimed we are living in a post-truth world, those slaves to reality – scientists – have been busy discovering facts and explaining the world for anyone who cared to listen. NASA releases a video Christmas message from the crew aboard the International Space Station where the astronauts are spending the holidays and sharing some ‘haute’ space cuisine.