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Categories: Paleontology: General, Space: Structures and Features

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Astronomers have gained new clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form. Researchers have detected large dusty clumps, close to a young star, that could collapse to create giant planets.

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Newly identified plant fossils found in Argentina suggest that a group of spurges long thought to have Asian origins may have first appeared in Gondwanan South America.

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Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. The star hosts both an inner disk and outer disk of gas and dust, separated by a 5 billion-mile-wide (8 billion kilometer) gap, and within that gap are two known gas-giant planets.

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Current evidence suggests that microparticles of cosmic dust collide and stick together to form larger dust aggregates that may eventually combine and develop into planets. Numerical models that accurately characterize the conditions required for colliding microparticle aggregates to stick together, rather than bounce apart, are therefore paramount to understanding the evolution of planets. Recent modeling suggests that dust aggregates are less likely to stick together after a collision as the size of the aggregates increases.

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An exquisitely preserved fossil forest from Japan provides missing links and helps reconstruct a whole Eurasia plant from the late Miocene epoch.

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The genetic changes that made it possible for humans to walk upright have been uncovered in a study that also shows how slight variations in skeletal proportions are linked to arthritis.

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Sabertooth cats make up a diverse group of long-toothed predators that roamed Africa around 6-7 million years ago, around the time that hominins -- the group that includes modern humans -- began to evolve. By examining one of the largest global Pliocene collections of fossils in Langebaanweg, north of Cape Town in South Africa, researchers present two new sabertooth species and the first family tree of the region's ancient sabertooths. Their results suggest that the distribution of sabertooths throughout ancient Africa might have been different than previously assumed, and the study provides important information about Africa's paleoenvironment.

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Researchers look at water in galaxies, its distribution and in particular its changes of state from ice to vapor, as important markers indicating areas of increased energy, in which black holes and stars are formed. A new study has now revealed the distribution of water within the J1135 galaxy, which is 12 billion light years away and formed when the Universe was a 'teenager', 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang . This water map, with unprecedented resolution, is the first ever to be obtained for such a remote galaxy. The map can help scientists to understand the physical processes taking place within J1135 and shed light on the dynamics, still partially unclear, surrounding the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies themselves.

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Did the pterosaurs, flying reptiles from the days of the dinosaurs, practice parental care or not? New research shows that pterosaurs were indeed caring parents -- but only the larger species.

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Astronomers have found the possible 'sibling' of a planet orbiting a distant star. The team has detected a cloud of debris that might be sharing this planet's orbit and which, they believe, could be the building blocks of a new planet or the remnants of one already formed. If confirmed, this discovery would be the strongest evidence yet that two exoplanets can share one orbit.

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New research has found the first evidence of a massive galaxy with no dark matter. The result is a challenge to the current standard model of cosmology.

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In a first for white dwarfs, the burnt-out cores of dead stars, astronomers have discovered that at least one member of this cosmic family is two faced. One side of the white dwarf is composed of hydrogen, while the other is made up of helium.

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Astronomers used the state-of-the-art capability of VERA, a Japanese network of radio telescopes, to uncover valuable clues about how rapidly growing 'young' supermassive black holes form, grow, and possibly evolve into more powerful quasars.

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Scientists have described an unusual fossil from around 125 million years ago in China that shows a dramatic moment in time when a carnivorous mammal attacked a larger plant-eating dinosaur. The two animals are locked in mortal combat, and it's among the first evidence to show actual predatory behavior by a mammal on a dinosaur. The fossil's presence challenges the view that dinosaurs had few threats from their mammal contemporaries during the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs were the dominant animals.

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Astronomers have found evidence that some stars boast unexpectedly strong surface magnetic fields, a discovery that challenges current models of how they evolve.

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a monster in the making in this observation of the exceptional galaxy cluster eMACS J1353.7+4329, which lies about eight billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. This collection of at least two galaxy clusters is in the process of merging together to create a cosmic monster, a single gargantuan cluster acting as a gravitational lens.

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New observations have distinguished the sites of star formation and a possible site of star death from the surrounding nebula in a galaxy 13.2 billion light-years away. This is the farthest that such structures have been observed.

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In an exciting scientific development, an international team of researchers have officially named a newly discovered 145-million-year-old pterosaur. The animal had enormous 2-meter wingspan and was nicknamed 'Elvis' when the fossil was first unearthed in Bavaria, Germany because of the giant pompadour-like bony crest on its skull. Now the animal has been given a formal scientific name of Petrodactyle wellnhoferi. The name translates as 'Wellnhofer's stone-finger' honouring legendary German palaeontologist Peter Wellnhofer who spent his career working on German pterosaurs. Petrodactyle is a very complete skeleton with nearly every bone preserved and in remarkable detail.

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Brown dwarf stars rarely emit radio waves. Here scientists have found the coldest star yet emitting at these long wave lengths. Understanding the science of 'ultracool brown dwarfs' will help deepen our knowledge of how stars evolve.

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Three bright objects initially identified as galaxies in observations from the James Webb Space Telescope might actually represent an exotic new form of star. If confirmed, the discovery would also shed light on the nature of dark matter.