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Categories: Environmental: Wildfires, Space: Astrophysics

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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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In 2020 and 2021, California experienced fire activity unlike anything recorded in the modern record. When the smoke cleared, the amount of burned forest totaled ten times more than the annual average going back to the late 1800s. We know that wildlife in western forests evolved with changing habitat and disturbances like wildfire. Each species responds differently, some benefiting from openings, others losing critical habitat. What we don't know is how increasing fire severity at large scales is impacting their habitat and survival, because many species are not adapted to these types of 'megafires.'

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Researchers have discovered solar-wind hydrogen in lunar samples, which indicates that water on the surface of the Moon may provide a vital resource for future lunar bases and longer-range space exploration.

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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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A new paper pinpoints obstacles and suggests strategies for getting more prescribed fire on the ground in the wildfire-prone U.S. West.

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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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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.

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How did the molecular building blocks for life end up on Earth? One long-standing theory is that they could have been delivered by comets. Now, researchers have shown how comets could deposit similar building blocks to other planets in the galaxy.

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The one thing everyone knows about black holes is that absolutely everything nearby gets sucked into them. Almost everything, it turns out. Astrophysicists have now determined conclusively that energy close to the event horizon of black hole M87* is pushing outward, not inward. The researchers have also created a way to test the prediction that black holes lose rotational energy and to establish it's that energy that produces the incredibly powerful jets.

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Astronomers have detailed radio observations of an extraordinary aurora-like display -- occurring 40,000 km above a relatively dark and cold patch on the Sun, known as a sunspot.

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Wildfires and drought have led to $11.2 billion in damages to privately held timberland in California, Oregon and Washington over the past two decades, a new Oregon State University study found.

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The second- and fourth-most distant galaxies ever observed have been discovered in a region of space known as Pandora's Cluster, or Abell 2744, using data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

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High-intensity, often catastrophic, wildfires have become increasingly frequent across the Western U.S. Researchers quantified the value of managed low-intensity burning to dramatically reduce the risk of such fires for years at a time.

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Astronomers have discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, that has been observed to date.

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Scientists have discovered 14 new transient objects during their time-lapse study of galaxy cluster MACS0416 -- located about 4.3 billion light years from Earth -- which they've dubbed as the 'Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster.'