Astronomy

When researchers discovered evidence of “dark oxygen” last year, the news spread around the world, but the biggest challenge to the science comes from its funders

Textbooks say that mitochondria exist to supply cells with energy, but experiments in fruit flies suggest they are also involved in sleep

Textbooks say that mitochondria exist to supply cells with energy, but experiments in fruit flies suggest they are also involved in sleep

'Here today, Gorn tomorrow. I think it's now time for other scary things to take their place.'

Marvel's new superhero movie isn't the only thing featuring some of the brightest stars.

A catalog of over 2,000 exploding white dwarf vampire stars, the largest ever gathered, has provided further evidence that dark energy is weakening.

The journey to launch is picking up pace for Europe’s MetOp Second Generation weather satellite – which hosts the Copernicus Sentinel-5 as part of its instrument package. Specialists at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou have completed the critical and hazardous task of fuelling the satellite, marking a major milestone in its final preparations for liftoff.

Midday seems to be the optimal time to take an oral exam at university, which could be due to students not generally being early risers

Midday seems to be the optimal time to take an oral exam at university, which could be due to students not generally being early risers

Astronomers have discovered a companion star in an incredibly tight orbit around Betelgeuse using the NASA and U.S. National Science Foundation-funded ‘Alopeke' instrument on Gemini North, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the NSF and operated by NSF NOIRLab. This discovery answers the longstanding mystery of the star’s varying brightness and provides insight into the physical mechanisms behind other variable red supergiants.

The New Horizons spacecraft is humanity's fastest-moving spacecraft and headed to interstellar space. Since its exploration of Pluto 10 years ago and subsequent flyby of Arrokoth in 2019, it's been traversing and studying the Kuiper Belt while looking for other flyby objects. That's not all it's been doing, however. New Horizons also has an extended program of making heliophysics observations. The mission science team has also planned astrophysical studies with the spacecraft's instruments. Those include measuring the intensity of the cosmic optical background and taking images of stars such as Proxima Centauri. As the spacecraft moves, the apparent positions of its stellar navigation targets have changed, but that hasn't bothered New Horizons one bit. It knows exactly where it is thanks to 3D observations of those nearby stars.

What are the JWST's Little Red Dots? While they appear to be galaxies, there's no observational certainty. New research examines the idea that they're actually stars, suggesting that they're actually the progenitors for supermassive black holes.

Magnetic fields play an important, if sometimes underappreciated, part in planetary systems. Without a strong magnetic field, planets can end up as a barren wasteland like Mars, or they could indirectly affect massive storms as can be seen on Jupiter. However, our understanding of planetary magnetic fields are limited to the eight planets in our solar system, as we haven’t yet accrued much data on the magnetic fields of exoplanets. That could be about to change, according to a new preprint paper by a group of research scientists from Europe, the US, India and the UAE.

Just imagine it, the news stories are all over your phone when you wake! The day will surely come that we will discover that we are not alone in the Universe! What happens the day after though? A new research paper from the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews tackles this question, outlining how NASA and the global scientific community should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Many people like to check that they have walked 10,000 steps over the course of a day, but falling short of that target still seems to bring serious health benefits

Many people like to check that they have walked 10,000 steps over the course of a day, but falling short of that target still seems to bring serious health benefits

Japan's Himawari-8 and Himawari-9 satellites, designed to study weather here on Earth, have also been quietly collecting valuable data on Venus for nearly a decade, scientists recently discovered.

Purdue University's new Neil Armstrong Space Prize, named for the school's most famous astronaut-alum, will honor achievements in "space discovery, innovation and human achievement."