Ames IA (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
The aurora borealis, or northern lights, that fill the sky in high-latitude regions have fascinated people for thousands of years. But how they're created, while theorized, had not been conclusively proven. In a new study, a team of physicists led by University of Iowa reports definitive evidence that the most brilliant auroras are produced by powerful electromagnetic waves during geomagne

La Palma (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
An international team of scientists led from the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), with participation from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of

Princeton NJ (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
It's hard to see more than a handful of stars from Princeton University, because the lights from New York City, Princeton and Philadelphia prevent our sky from ever getting pitch black, but stargazers who get into more rural areas can see hundreds of naked-eye stars - and a few smudgy objects, too. The biggest smudge is the Milky Way itself, the billions of stars that make up our spiral ga

Moscow, Russia (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
Scientists from the University of Graz (Austria), Skoltech and their colleagues from the US and Germany have developed a new neural network that can reliably detect coronal holes from space-based observations. This application paves the way for more reliable space weather predictions and provides valuable information for the study of the solar activity cycle. The paper was published in the journ

Mumbai, India (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR) in Pune, and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), in Bangalore, has used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) to measure the atomic hydrogen gas content of galaxies 9 billion years ago, in the young universe. This is the earliest epoch in the universe for which there is a measurement of the atomic hydrog

Washington DC (UPI) Jun 7, 2021
Move over water bears, rotifers are pretty tough too. According to new research, Bdelloid rotifers, a class of microscopic invertebrates, can remain frozen for thousands of years and survive. Recently, researchers at the Soil Cryology Lab - part of the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, located in Russia - reanimated a Bdelloid rotifer that ha

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
Finding the hypothetical particle axion could mean finding out for the first time what happened in the Universe a second after the Big Bang, suggests a new study published in Physical Review D on June 7. How far back into the Universe's past can we look today? In the electromagnetic spectrum, observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background - commonly referred to as the CMB - allow us to se

Washington DC (UPI) Jun 08, 2021
Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a communications satellite for SiriusXM early Sunday from Florida in the first such mission since one of the broadcast company's spacecraft failed after launch in December. The satellite, known as SXM-8, was lifted aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 12:26 a.m. from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch, which occurred at the start of

Beijing (XNA) Jun 08, 2021
China tested a new rocket-booster parachute system during a recent launch from the southwest of the country, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said on Monday. The system was tested on June 3 when the meteorological satellite Fengyun-4B was sent into a geostationary orbit via a Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province.

Washington DC (UPI) Jun 7, 2021
Going to the bathroom at the International Space Station is about to get easier and cleaner with a new toilet system that cost NASA $23 million to develop. Astronauts are connecting and checking out the toilet, which actually is a high-tech improvement to the space station's water recycling system. The multimillion-dollar budget for the project includes another unit installed ins