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Categories: Geoscience: Geomagnetic Storms, Space: Structures and Features

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Astronomers have provided the first observation of water and other molecules in the highly irradiated inner, rocky-planet-forming regions of a disk in one of the most extreme environments in our galaxy. These results suggest that the conditions for terrestrial planet formation can occur in a possible broader range of environments than previously thought. 

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Astronomers have found a key new system of six transiting planets orbiting a bright star in a harmonic rhythm. This rare property enabled the team to determine the planetary orbits which initially appeared as an unsolvable riddle.

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While life on Earth is relatively new, geologically speaking, the ingredients that combined to form it might be much older than once thought. The simplest amino acid, carbamic acid, could have formed alongside stars or planets within interstellar ices. The findings could be used to train deep space instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope to search for prebiotic molecules in distant, star-forming regions of the universe.

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Cutting-edge computer simulations combined with theoretical calculations are helping astronomers better understand the origin of some of the universe's most energetic and mysterious light shows -- gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs. The new unified model confirms that some long-lasting GRBs are created in the aftermath of cosmic mergers that spawn an infant black hole surrounded by a giant disk of natal material.

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In a remarkable discovery, astronomers have found a disc around a young star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy neighboring ours. It's the first time such a disc, identical to those forming planets in our own Milky Way, has ever been found outside our galaxy. The new observations reveal a massive young star, growing and accreting matter from its surroundings and forming a rotating disc.

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Scientists have announced the discovery of nearly 300 gamma ray pulsars.

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Researchers have discovered a new relationship between the Sun's magnetic field and its sunspot cycle, that can help predict when the peak in solar activity will occur. Their work indicates that the maximum intensity of solar cycle 25, the ongoing sunspot cycle, is imminent and likely to occur within a year.

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Wondering whether whether Dark Matter particles actually are produced inside a jet of standard model particles, led researchers to explore a new detector signature known as semi-visible jets, which scientists never looked at before.

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Scientists have simulated conditions that allow hazy skies to form in water-rich exoplanets, a crucial step in determining how haziness muddles important telescope observations for the search of habitable worlds beyond the solar system.

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In 1991, an experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power to produce it, and the particle had more energy than was theoretically possible for cosmic rays traveling to Earth from other galaxies. Simply put, the particle should not exist. On May 27, 2021, the Telescope Array experiment detected the second-highest extreme-energy cosmic ray. The newly dubbed Amaterasu particle deepens the mystery of the origin, propagation and particle physics of rare, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

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The latest image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

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A ground-breaking new discovery could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe.  Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars -- until now mainly thought to exist in double stars -- could in fact be 'triples'.  The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects -- a subset of B stars -- which are considered an important 'test bed' for developing theories on how stars evolve more generally. 

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If you look at massive galaxies teeming with stars, you might be forgiven in thinking they are star factories, churning out brilliant balls of gas. But actually, less evolved dwarf galaxies have bigger regions of star factories, with higher rates of star formation. Now, University of Michigan researchers have discovered the reason underlying this: These galaxies enjoy a 10-million-year delay in blowing out the gas cluttering up their environments. Star-forming regions are able to hang on to their gas and dust, allowing more stars to coalesce and evolve. In these relatively pristine dwarf galaxies, massive stars--stars about 20 to 200 times the mass of our sun--collapse into black holes instead of exploding as supernovae. But in more evolved, polluted galaxies, like our Milky Way, they are more likely to explode, thereby generating a collective superwind. Gas and dust get blasted out of the galaxy, and star formation quickly stops.   

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Our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a much larger formation, the local Supercluster structure, which contains several massive galaxy clusters and thousands of individual galaxies. Due to its pancake-like shape, which measures almost a billion light years across, it is also referred to as the Supergalactic Plane. Why is the vast supergalactic plane teeming with only one type of galaxies? This old cosmic puzzle may now have been solved.

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope, CECILIA Survey receives first data from galaxies forming two-to-three billion years after the Big Bang. By examining light from these 33 galaxies, researchers discovered their elemental composition and temperature. The ultra-deep spectrum revealed eight distinct elements: Hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, argon and nickel. The teenage galaxies also were extremely hot, reaching temperatures higher than 13,350 degrees Celsius.

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Gamma-ray flares from blazars can be accompanied by high-energy neutrino emission. To better understand this phenomenon, an international research team has statistically analyzed 145 bright blazars. They constructed weekly binned light curves and utilized a Bayesian algorithm, finding that their sample was dominated by blazars with low flare duty cycles and energy fractions. The study suggests that high-energy neutrinos of blazars might be produced mainly during the flare phase.

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ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) has demonstrated the highest resolution yet with observations of an old star. The observations show that the star is surrounded by a ring-like structure of gas and that gas from the star is escaping to the surrounding space. Future observations with the newly demonstrated high resolution are expected to elucidate, not only the end of a star's life, but also the beginning, when planets are still forming.

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After a distant star's explosive death, an active stellar corpse was the likely source of repeated energetic flares observed over several months -- a phenomenon astronomers had never seen before, astronomers report.

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Astronomers have used recent observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope to study the atmosphere of the nearby exoplanet WASP-107b. Peering deep into the fluffy atmosphere of WASP-107b they discovered not only water vapor and sulfur dioxide, but even silicate sand clouds. These particles reside within a dynamic atmosphere that exhibits vigorous transport of material.

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Data from a NASA mission to map dark matter around galaxy clusters has been saved by a new recovery system. The system allowed the retrieval of gigabytes of information, even after communication failed and the balloon-based telescope was damaged in the landing process.