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Categories: Paleontology: Climate, Space: Astronomy

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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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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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The material record that currently exists on the moon is rapidly becoming at risk of being destroyed if proper attention isn't paid during the new space era, scientists say. They propose a new scientific subfield: planetary geoarchaeology, the study of how cultural and natural processes on Earth's moon, on Mars and across the solar system may be altering, preserving or destroying the material record of space exploration.

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A large portion of Greenland was an ice-free tundra landscape -- perhaps covered by trees and roaming woolly mammoths -- in the recent geologic past (about 416,000 years ago), a new study shows. The results help overturn a previous view that much of the Greenland ice sheet persisted for most of the last two and a half million years. Instead, moderate warming, from 424,000 to 374,000 years ago, led to dramatic melting. At that time, the melting of Greenland caused at least five feet of sea level rise, despite atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide being far lower than today (280 vs. 420 ppm). This indicates that the ice sheet on Greenland may be more sensitive to human-caused climate change than previously understood -- and will be vulnerable to irreversible, rapid melting in coming centuries.

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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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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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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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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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A team has found that NASA's Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter frequently encounters giant swirling waves at the boundary between the solar wind and Jupiter's magnetosphere. The waves are an important process for transferring energy and mass from the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun, to planetary space environments.

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In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, alien radio signals would be swamped by interference from radio sources on Earth. To confirm, researchers point away from the source and then back. If it's still there, it may be interesting. Researchers have come up with a new method that looks for evidence the signal has passed through the interstellar medium. The technique will boost confidence in any candidate signal discovered in the future.

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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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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.

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An international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene. A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages.

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Research shows global cooling of the climate 10 million years ago led to an explosion of diversity in terrestrial orchids.

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Researchers are using a new model to clarify why millions of years ago more animal species from Asia made the leap to the Australian continent than vice versa. The climate in which the species evolved played an important role.

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As the Arctic warms, shrinking glaciers are exposing bubbling groundwater springs which could provide an underestimated source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, finds new research.

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An El Niño event has officially begun. The climate phenomenon, which originates in the tropical Pacific and occurs in intervals of a few years will shape weather across the planet for the next year or more and give rise to various climatic extremes. El Niño-like conditions can also occur on longer time scales of decades or centuries. This has been shown to have occurred in the recent past.