Rome, Italy (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
"The cosmological principle is like an ultimate kind of statement of humility," says James Adam, an astrophysicist at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and lead author of a new study. The Cosmological Principle posits that no specific location in the Universe is unique or central, and that on the largest scales, the cosmos exhibits uniformity in all directions. This

Paris, France (SPX) Feb 16, 2025
The European Space Agency (ESA) has taken a significant step in advancing space-based optical communications by signing a contract with Thales Alenia Space to develop Element #2 of the High-throughput Digital and Optical Network (HydRON). This initiative aims to deploy an advanced laser satellite system that will revolutionize data transmission across space. The newly planned satellite collector

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
Astronomers analyzing data from the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope in Western Australia, encountered an unexpected anomaly. Instead of deep-space radio signals from over 13 billion years ago, they detected a terrestrial television broadcast-despite the telescope's location in a designated radio quiet zone designed to minimize signal interference. The surprising find led Brown

Madrid, Spain (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
Traditional models of black holes, as predicted by Einstein's General Relativity, feature singularities-regions where physical laws cease to function. Understanding how these singularities might be resolved within the framework of quantum gravity remains a key challenge in theoretical physics. Researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) have now provi

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
Researchers at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) are examining Saturn's largest moon, Titan, to determine its tidal dissipation rate-the energy lost as it interacts with Saturn's immense gravitational field. Insights into this process provide valuable clues about Titan's internal composition and its orbital development over time. "When most people think of tides, they picture ocean movem

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
A recent study led by Aomawa Shields, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, suggests that exoplanets orbiting white dwarf stars could be more habitable than previously assumed. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal, compares the climates of exoplanets orbiting two different types of stars-a hypothetical white dwarf and Kepler-62, a m

London, UK (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
An international team of astronomers has validated the discovery of a super-Earth positioned within the habitable zone of a nearby Sun-like star. Initially detected two years ago by Oxford University scientist Dr. Michael Cretignier, the planet's existence has now been confirmed following an extensive analysis of observational data spanning more than 20 years. The findings, which offer new oppor

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
A new study challenges the long-held belief that intelligent life is a rare cosmic accident, proposing instead that humanity's emergence was a predictable outcome of Earth's evolving environment. This shift in perspective, led by researchers at Penn State, suggests that conditions for intelligence may arise naturally on other planets as well. The study disputes the "hard steps" model, a fr

East Lansing MI (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
From helping catalyze interstellar reactions and fueling the birth of stars to its presence in neighborhood gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter, trihydrogen, or H3+, is best known as the "the molecule that made the universe." While we have a clear picture of how the majority of H3+ is formed - a hydrogen molecule, or H2, colliding with its ionized counterpart, H2+ - scientists are keen to u

Boulder CO (SPX) Feb 18, 2025
New Horizons is healthy and continuing to speed outward across the Kuiper Belt. Our spacecraft is 61 times as far from the Sun as Earth, or over 5.5 billion miles from home! Radio signals, traveling to and from New Horizons at the speed of light - about 186,000 miles per second - take about nine hours to cover that distance. New Horizons is about halfway through a hibernation period that