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Categories: Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology, Space: General

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This year and next, Americans will have the extraordinary opportunity to witness two solar eclipses as both will be visible throughout the continental U.S. Both occurrences promise to be remarkable events and teachable moments but preparation is essential. Astronomers provide a practical playbook to help teachers, students, and the general public prepare for the eclipse events.

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Scientists have observed a star swallowing a planet for the first time. Earth will meet a similar fate in 5 billion years.

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An international research team has for the first time successfully isolated ancient human DNA from a Paleolithic artefact: a pierced deer tooth discovered in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia. To preserve the integrity of the artefact, they developed a new, nondestructive method for isolating DNA from ancient bones and teeth. From the DNA retrieved they were able to reconstruct a precise genetic profile of the woman who used or wore the pendant, as well as of the deer from which the tooth was taken. Genetic dates obtained for the DNA from both the woman and the deer show that the pendant was made between 19,000 and 25,000 years ago. The tooth remains fully intact after analysis, providing testimony to a new era in ancient DNA research, in which it may become possible to directly identify the users of ornaments and tools produced in the deep past.

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Traces of sex hormones extracted from a woolly mammoth's tusk provide the first direct evidence that adult males experienced musth, a testosterone-driven episode of heightened aggression against rival males, according to a new study.

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Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), researchers have found for the first time the fingerprints left by the explosion of the first stars in the Universe. They detected three distant gas clouds whose chemical composition matches what we expect from the first stellar explosions. These findings bring us one step closer to understanding the nature of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang.

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What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth.

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The first building blocks of life on Earth may have formed thanks to eruptions from our Sun, a new study finds. A series of chemical experiments show how solar particles, colliding with gases in Earth's early atmosphere, can form amino acids and carboxylic acids, the basic building blocks of proteins and organic life.

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Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to study a rocky exoplanet known as GJ 486 b. It is too close to its star to be within the habitable zone, with a surface temperature of about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius). And yet, their observations show hints of water vapor.

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Astronomers have discovered a new 'tidal disruption event,' in which the center of a galaxy lights up as its supermassive black hole rips apart a passing star. The outburst is the closest tidal disruption event observed to date, and one of the first to be identified at infrared wavelengths.

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A team of Japanese astronomers used simultaneous ground-based and space-based observations to capture a more complete picture of a superflare on a star. The observed flare started with a very massive, high-velocity prominence eruption. These results give us a better idea of how superflares and stellar prominence eruptions occur.

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A new study looked at a known binary star (two stars orbiting around a mutual center of gravity), analyzing starlight obtained from a range of ground- and space-based telescopes. The researchers found that the stars, located in a neighboring dwarf galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud, are in partial contact and swapping material with each other, with one star currently 'feeding' off the other. They orbit each other every three days and are the most massive touching stars (known as contact binaries) yet observed.

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An interdisciplinary team has developed an algorithm that immediately checks its own calculations of merging black holes' properties and corrects its result if necessary -- inexpensively and rapidly. The machine learning method provides very accurate information about the observed gravitational waves and will be ready for use when the global network of gravitational-wave detectors starts its next observing run in May.

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Astronomers have observed, in one image, the shadow of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) and the powerful jet expelled from it. Thanks to this new image, astronomers can better understand how black holes can launch such energetic jets.

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New research suggests future Martian botanists may be able to grow gene-edited rice on Mars.

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Scientists found parallels between the neural circuitry that guides locomotion in sea slugs and in more complex animals like mammals.

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Scientists have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars -- the brightest, most powerful objects in the Universe -- by discovering that they are ignited by galaxies colliding.

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In new 3D computer simulations, astrophysicists modeled black holes of varying masses and then hurled stars (about the size of our sun) past them to see what might happen. If they exist, intermediate-mass black holes likely devour wayward stars like a messy toddler -- taking a few bites and then flinging the remains across the galaxy.

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Astrophysicists have provided the most direct evidence yet that Dark Matter does not constitute ultramassive particles as is commonly thought but instead comprises particles so light that they travel through space like waves. Their work resolves an outstanding problem in astrophysics first raised two decades ago: why do models that adopt ultramassive Dark Matter particles fail to correctly predict the observed positions and the brightness of multiple images of the same galaxy created by gravitational lensing?

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We have known for a while that asteroid 3200 Phaethon acts like a comet. It brightens and forms a tail when it's near the Sun, and it is the source of the annual Geminid meteor shower, even though comets are responsible for most meteor showers. Scientists had blamed Phaethon's comet-like behavior on dust escaping from the asteroid as it's scorched by the Sun. However, a new study using two NASA solar observatories reveals that Phaethon's tail is not dusty at all but is actually made of sodium gas.

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Researchers develop a model to describe the interaction between a rocket plume and the surface of a planetary body in near-vacuum conditions. The computational framework takes in information about the rocket, its engines, and the surface composition and topography, as well as the atmospheric conditions and gravitational forces at the landing site, and the results can be used to evaluate the safety and feasibility of a proposed landing site and to optimize the design of spacecraft and rocket engines for planetary landings.