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Categories: Anthropology: Cultures, Space: Astrophysics

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Astronomers have found that supermassive black holes obscured by dust are more likely to grow and release tremendous amounts of energy when they are inside galaxies that are expected to collide with a neighbouring galaxy.

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Globular clusters are the most massive and oldest star clusters in the Universe. They can contain up to 1 million of them. The chemical composition of these stars, born at the same time, shows anomalies that are not found in any other population of stars. Explaining this specificity is one of the great challenges of astronomy. After having imagined that supermassive stars could be at the origin, a team believes it has discovered the first chemical trace attesting to their presence in globular proto-clusters, born about 440 million years after the Big Bang.

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Astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth.

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A new study finds that early human species adapted to mosaic landscapes and diverse food resources, which would have increased our ancestor's resilience to past shifts in climate.

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A team used a first-of-its-kind technique to measure the expansion rate of the Universe, providing insight that could help more accurately determine the Universe's age and help physicists and astronomers better understand the cosmos.

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Scientists analyzed over a decade's worth of data about 16 young supermassive stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Supermassive stars typically are formed in pairs, but the new study found that all 16 of the stars were singletons. The findings support a scenario in which the supermassive black hole drives nearby stars to either merge or be disrupted, with one of the pair being ejected from the system.

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Researchers observed exoplanet GJ 1214b's atmosphere by measuring the heat it emits while orbiting its host star. Astronomers directly detected the light emitted by a sub-Neptune exoplanet -- a category of planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

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Scientists have used mitochondrial DNA to trace a female lineage from northern coastal China to the Americas. By integrating contemporary and ancient mitochondrial DNA, the team found evidence of at least two migrations: one during the last ice age, and one during the subsequent melting period. Around the same time as the second migration, another branch of the same lineage migrated to Japan, which could explain Paleolithic archeological similarities between the Americas, China, and Japan.

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Astronomers have revealed new evidence about the properties of the giant bubbles of high-energy gas that extend far above and below the Milky Way galaxy's center.

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Humans inherited genetic material from Neanderthals that affects the shape of our noses, finds a new study.

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Scientists have used sub-surface imaging and aerial surveys to see through floodplains in the Red Lily Lagoon area of West Arnhem Land in Australia. These ground-breaking methods showed how this important landscape in the Northern Territory was altered as sea levels rose about 8,000 years ago.

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A 'beautiful effect' predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar -- a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to an astrophysicist.

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Stone tools recovered from near the Senegalese coast extend occupation of the region back to 150 thousand years ago and are comparable to those seen across Africa at this time, but uniquely persist in the region until 10 thousand years ago.

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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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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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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 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.