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Categories: Archaeology: General, Offbeat: Space

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Scientists have discovered a new ring system around a dwarf planet on the edge of the Solar System. The ring system orbits much further out than is typical for other ring systems, calling into question current theories of how ring systems are formed.

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Astronomers have uncovered striking new evidence for a mass migration of stars into the Andromeda Galaxy. Intricate patterns in the motions of stars reveal an immigration history very similar to that of the Milky Way.

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Caribou have been using the same Arctic calving grounds for more than 3,000 years. Female caribou shed their antlers within days of giving birth, leaving behind a record of their annual travels across Alaska and Canada's Yukon that persists on the cold tundra for hundreds or even thousands of years. Researchers recovered antlers that have sat undisturbed on the arctic tundra since the Bronze Age.

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The collapse of the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age has been blamed on various factors, from war with other territories to internal strife. Now, scientists have used tree ring and isotope records to pinpoint a more likely culprit: three straight years of severe drought.

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Researchers have pinpointed two intervals when ice and ocean conditions would have been favorable to support early human migration from Asia to North America late in the last ice age, a new paper shows.

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The universe's carbon atoms complete a journey that spans eons -- forming in the hearts of dying stars, then becoming a part of planets and even living organisms. Now, a team has uncovered the chemistry behind one tiny, but critical, step in this process.

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Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope's first images of galaxy clusters, researchers have, for the very first time, been able to examine very compact structures of star clusters inside galaxies, so-called clumps.

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An interdisciplinary team of scientistshas found that rapid sea-level rise drove early settlers in Southeast Asia to migrate during the prehistoric period, increasing the genetic diversity of the region today.

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New research has revealed that the process of 'peopling' the entire continent of Sahul -- the combined mega continent that joined Australia with New Guinea when sea levels were much lower than today -- took 10,000 years. Sophisticated models show the scale of the challenges faced by the ancestors of Indigenous people making their mass migration across the supercontinent more than 60,000 years ago. This pattern led to a rapid expansion both southward toward the Great Australian Bight, and northward from the Kimberley region to settle all parts of New Guinea and, later, the southwest and southeast of Australia.

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Astronomers have directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf -- the surviving core of a burned-out, Sun-like star. Researchers found that the white dwarf is 56 percent the mass of our Sun. This agrees with earlier theoretical predictions of the white dwarf's mass and corroborates current theories of how white dwarfs evolve as the end product of a typical star's evolution. The unique observation yields insights into theories of the structure and composition of white dwarfs.

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An analysis of cremated bone fragments from burial mounds in Derbyshire, UK, provides the first solid evidence that Vikings crossed the North Sea with horses, dogs and other animals as early as the ninth century AD. Researchers analyzed samples of human and animal remains, finding that they most likely originated from Scandinavia and that they died soon after arrival in Britain.

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Astronomers using data from the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), have made the first confirmed detection of a star system that will one day form a kilonova -- the ultra-powerful, gold-producing explosion created by merging neutron stars. These systems are so phenomenally rare that only about 10 such systems are thought to exist in the entire Milky Way.

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What happened shortly after the universe was born in the Big Bang and began to expand? Bubbles occurred and a previously unknown phase transition happened, according to particle physicists.

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Researchers have completed the first real-world study of Martian dust dynamics based on Ingenuity's historic first flights on the Red Planet, paving the way for future extraterrestrial rotorcraft missions. The work could support NASA's Mars Sample Return Program, which will retrieve samples collected by Perseverance, or the Dragonfly mission that will set course for Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in 2027.

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When a scientist discovered surprising evidence that Saturn's smallest, innermost moon could generate the right amount of heat to support a liquid internal ocean, colleagues began studying Mimas' surface to understand how its interior may have evolved. Numerical simulations of the moon's Herschel impact basin, the most striking feature on its heavily cratered surface, determined that the basin's structure and the lack of tectonics on Mimas are compatible with a thinning ice shell and geologically young ocean.

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Researchers have applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest.

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In October 2020, a highly magnetic neutron star called SGR 1935+2154 abruptly began spinning more slowly. Astrophysicist now show the magnetar's rotational slowdown could have been caused by a volcano-like rupture near its magnetic pole.

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A giant diffuse tail of stars has been discovered emanating from a large, faint dwarf galaxy. The presence of a tail indicates that the galaxy has experienced recent interaction with another galaxy. This is an important clue for understanding how so called 'ultra-diffuse' galaxies are formed.

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Earth's potassium arrived by meteoritic delivery service finds new research led by Earth and planetary scientists. Their work shows that some primitive meteorites contain a different mix of potassium isotopes than those found in other, more-chemically processed meteorites. These results can help elucidate the processes that shaped our Solar System and determined the composition of its planets.

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Scientists have discovered the first gamma-ray eclipses from a special type of binary star system using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. These so-called spider systems each contain a pulsar -- the superdense, rapidly rotating remains of a star that exploded in a supernova -- that slowly erodes its companion.