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Categories: Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds, Space: Astrophysics

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Fossils of kelp along the Pacific Coast are rare. Until now, the oldest fossil dated from 14 million years ago, leading to the view that today's denizens of the kelp forest -- marine mammals, urchins, sea birds -- coevolved with kelp. A recent amateur discovery pushes back the origin of kelp to 32 million years ago, long before these creatures appeared. A new analysis suggests the first kelp grazers were extinct, hippo-like animals called desmostylians.

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Astronomers have created the most sensitive radio image ever of a globular cluster, an ancient ball of tightly-packed stars.

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Astronomers have discovered a planet closer and younger than any other Earth-sized world yet identified. It's a remarkably hot world whose proximity to our own planet and to a star like our sun mark it as a unique opportunity to study how planets evolve.

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Researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have discovered X-ray activity that sheds light on the evolution of galaxies.

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Astrophysicists have confirmed the accuracy of an analytical model that can unlock key information about supermassive black holes and the stars they engulf.

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A team of astronomers has created the first-ever map of magnetic field structures within a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Previous studies on galactic magnetic fields only gave a very general picture, but the new study reveals that magnetic fields in the spiral arms of our galaxy break away from this general picture significantly and are tilted away from the galactic average by a high degree. The findings suggest magnetic fields strongly impact star-forming regions which means they played a part in the creation of our own solar system.

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Astronomers analyzing 13 years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have found an unexpected and as yet unexplained feature outside of our galaxy.

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Researchers have identified a 3D fragment of fossilized skin that is at least 21 million years than previously described skin fossils. The skin, which belonged to an early species of Paleozoic reptile, has a pebbled surface and most closely resembles crocodile skin. It's the oldest example of preserved epidermis, the outermost layer of skin in terrestrial reptiles, birds, and mammals, which was an important evolutionary adaptation in the transition to life on land.

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Astronomers have made the rare discovery of a small, cold exoplanet and its massive outer companion -- shedding light on the formation of planets like Earth.

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Beta Pictoris, a young planetary system located just 63 light-years away, continues to intrigue scientists even after decades of in-depth study. It possesses the first dust disk imaged around another star -- a disk of debris produced by collisions between asteroids, comets, and planetesimals. Observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revealed a second debris disk in this system, inclined with respect to the outer disk, which was seen first. Now, a team of astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the Beta Pictoris system (Beta Pic) has discovered a new, previously unseen structure.

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Picrodontids -- an extinct family of placental mammals that lived several million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs -- are not primates as previously believed.

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Astronomers have found a brown dwarf (an object more massive than Jupiter but smaller than a star) with infrared emission from methane, likely due to energy in its upper atmosphere. This is an unexpected discovery because the brown dwarf, W1935, is cold and lacks a host star; therefore, there is no obvious source for the upper atmosphere energy. The team speculates that the methane emission may be due to processes generating aurorae.

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In summer 2022, astronomers detected the most powerful and most distant fast radio burst (FRB) ever observed. Now, astronomers have pinpointed the extraordinary object's birthplace -- and it's rather curious, indeed. Using images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers traced the FRB back to not one galaxy but a group of at least seven galaxies.

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In the culmination of a decade's worth of effort, scientists analyzed an unprecedented sample of more than 1,500 supernovae classified using machine learning. They placed the strongest constraints on the expansion of the universe ever obtained with the DES supernova survey. While consistent with the current standard cosmological model, the results do not rule out a more complex theory that the density of dark energy in the universe could have varied over time.

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Astronomers have detected a three-ringed structure in the nursery of planets in the inner planet-forming disk of a young star. This configuration suggests two Jupiter-mass planets are forming in the gaps between the rings. The detailed analysis is consistent with abundant solid iron grains complementing the dust composition. As a result, the disk likely harbors metals and minerals akin to those in the Solar System's terrestrial planets. It offers a glimpse into conditions resembling the early Solar System over four billion years ago during the formation of rocky planets such as Mercury, Venus, and Earth.

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Astronomers believe they may have found the origin of the universe's giant odd radio circles: they are shells formed by outflowing galactic winds, possibly from massive exploding stars known as supernovae.

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We don't know how magnetic fields in the cosmos formed. Now a new theoretical research tells how the invisible part of our universe could help us find out, suggesting a primordial genesis, even within a second of the Big Bang.

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A new study has revealed the chemical bonding behind sodium's high-pressure transformation from shiny metal to transparent insulator.

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New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs utilizing Bayesian statistical inference.

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A whirling image features a bright spiral galaxy known as MCG-01-24-014, which is located about 275 million light-years from Earth. In addition to being a well-defined spiral galaxy, MCG-01-24-014 has an extremely energetic core known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) and is categorized as a Type-2 Seyfert galaxy. Seyfert galaxies, along with quasars, host one of the most common subclasses of AGN. While the precise categorization of AGNs is nuanced, Seyfert galaxies tend to be relatively nearby and their central AGN does not outshine its host, while quasars are very distant AGNs with incredible luminosities that outshine their host galaxies.