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Categories: Archaeology: General, Space: Exploration
Published New study puts a definitive age on Saturn's rings -- they're really young
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source Physicists measured the flux of interplanetary dust around Saturn. The researchers concluded that the planet's rings formed less than 400 million years ago, making them much younger than Saturn itself.
Published Astronomers reveal the largest cosmic explosion ever seen
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source Astronomers have uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed. The explosion is more than ten times brighter than any known supernova and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole.
Published Hidden supermassive black holes brought to life by galaxies on collision course
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Celestial monsters at the origin of globular clusters
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Hidden views of vast stellar nurseries
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Measurement of the Universe's expansion rate weighs in on a longstanding debate in physics and astronomy
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Astronomers find no young binary stars near Milky Way's black hole
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Researchers measure the light emitted by a sub-Neptune planet's atmosphere
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Tooth enamel provides clues to hunter-gatherer lifestyle of Neanderthals
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source A study has given an intriguing glimpse of the hunting habits and diets of Neanderthals and other humans living in western Europe.
Published How 1,000 undergraduates helped solve an enduring mystery about the sun
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source For three years at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of students spent an estimated 56,000 hours analyzing the behavior of hundreds of solar flares. Their results could help astrophysicists understand how the sun's corona reaches temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.
Published Evidence of Ice Age human migrations from China to the Americas and Japan
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Galactic bubbles are more complex than imagined
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Webb looks for Fomalhaut's asteroid belt and finds much more
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that's 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system's Kuiper Belt of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune. The inner belts -- which had never been seen before -- were revealed by Webb for the first time.
Published Archaeologists map hidden NT landscape where first Australians lived more than 60,000 years ago
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Neutron star's X-rays reveal 'photon metamorphosis'
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Hubble follows shadow play around planet-forming disk
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source The young star TW Hydrae is playing 'shadow puppets' with scientists observing it with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In 2017, astronomers reported discovering a shadow sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding the red dwarf star. The shadow isn't from a planet, but from an inner disk slightly inclined relative to the much larger outer disk -- causing it to cast a shadow. One explanation is that an unseen planet's gravity is pulling dust and gas into the planet's inclined orbit. The young star TW Hydrae is playing 'shadow puppets' with scientists observing it with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Now, a second shadow -- playing a game of peek-a-boo -- has emerged in just a few years between observations stored in Hubble's MAST archive. This could be from yet another disk nestled inside the system. The two disks are likely evidence of a pair of planets under construction.
Published Astronomers spot a star swallowing a planet
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source Scientists have observed a star swallowing a planet for the first time. Earth will meet a similar fate in 5 billion years.
Published Scientists recover an ancient woman's DNA from a 20,000-year-old pendant
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published Astronomers find distant gas clouds with leftovers of the first stars
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source 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.
Published What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away?
(via sciencedaily.com) Original source What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth.