An extinct lineage of parasitic wasps dating from the mid-Cretaceous period and preserved in amber may have used their Venus flytrap-like abdomen to capture and immobilize their prey.
Astronomers have identified a bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in the very early universe. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.
The moon will cross in front of the sun for around four hours on Saturday, creating a partial solar eclipse that careful skygazers will be able to see in parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
NASA researchers conducted initial validation of a new airspace management system designed to enable crews to use aircraft to fight and monitor wildland fires 24 hours a day, even during low-visibility conditions.
The James Webb Space Telescope has given us a view of the earliest moments of galaxy formation in the universe. It’s also revealed a few surprises. One of these is the appearance of small, highly redshifted objects nicknamed “little red dots (LRDs).” We aren’t entirely sure what they are, but a new study points to an answer.
A new study led by the University of Vermont (UVM) uncovers a critical challenge in accurately classifying precipitation as rain or snow using surface weather data.
The slow race of getting NASA’s Space Launch System rocket pieced together for next year’s Artemis II moon mission jumped a big hurdle over the weekend.
Neptune lies in the frigid, dark, vast frontier of the outer edges of our solar system, about 3 billion miles away from the sun.
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, astronomers have observed a massive and hot galaxy cluster known as PLCKG287.0+32.9 (or PLCKG287 for short). Results of the observational campaign, presented March 17 on the arXiv pre-print server, deliver important insights into the morphological and thermodynamical properties of this cluster.
Many protoplanetary disks in which new planets are formed are much smaller than thought. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) scientists of the Leiden Observatory (the Netherlands) looked at 73 protoplanetary disks in the Lupus region. They found that many young stars host modest disks of gas and dust, some as small as 1.2 astronomical units. The research, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, establishes an important link between observed protoplanetary disks and exoplanets.
In his home office in Durham, Duke neuroscientist Richard Mooney shows a series of images of a bird’s brain on song. In one, what looks like a pointillist painting illustrates a young zebra finch’s myriad attempts to sound more like an adult, capable of wooing a mate. In another, squiggly lines trace the ebb and flow of chemical signals in the reward circuit of the bird’s brain.
ESA’s Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) has arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States. This cutting-edge European experiment will test fundamental physics from the outside of ESA’s Columbus module on the International Space Station, measuring time from orbit with unprecedented precision.
For the first time on a global scale, 20 years of observations on Mars have been condensed into a single study led by Francisco Brasil and Pedro Machado, both researchers from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon (CIÊNCIAS ULisboa). This study, an extensive and comprehensive analysis of the red planet’s atmospheric waves, has just been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
A stunning blue and white spiral spotted in skies across Europe was created by frozen fuel tumbling from a SpaceX rocket, according to weather forecasters and scientists.
Deep below Earth’s surface, rock and mineral formations lay hidden with a secret brilliance. Under a black light, the chemicals fossilized within shine in brilliant hues of pink, blue and green. Scientists are using these fluorescent features to understand how the caves formed and how life is supported in extreme environments, which may reveal how life could persist in faraway places, like Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
SpaceX sent up a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office from the Space Coast on Monday afternoon.
Using Spektr-RG and Chandra space observatories, Chinese astronomers have investigated a nearby spiral galaxy known as NGC 7793. Results of the new study, published March 13 on the arXiv preprint server, deliver important insights into the properties of the galaxy’s hot gaseous halo.
Say hello to one of the Milky Way’s neighbors! This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a scene from one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy located about 200,000 light-years away. Most of the galaxy resides in the constellation Tucana, but a small section crosses over into the neighboring constellation Hydrus.
What’s on and in a star? What happens in an active galactic nucleus? Answering those questions is the goal of a proposed giant interferometer on the moon. It’s called the Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager (AeSI) and would deploy a series of 15–30 optical/ultraviolet-sensitive telescopes in a 1-km elliptical array across the lunar surface.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured a beautiful juxtaposition of the nearby protostellar outflow known as Herbig-Haro 49/50 with a perfectly positioned, more distant spiral galaxy. Due to the close proximity of this Herbig-Haro object to Earth, this new composite infrared image of the outflow from a young star allows researchers to examine details on small spatial scales like never before. With Webb, we can better understand how the jet activity associated with the formation of young stars can affect their surrounding environment.
