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Neutron stars – the compressed remains of massive stars gone supernova – are the densest “normal” objects in the known universe. (Black holes are technically denser, but far from normal.) Just a single sugar-cube worth of neutron-star material would weigh 100 million tons here on Earth, or about the same as the entire human population. Though astronomers and physicists have studied and marveled at these objects for decades, many mysteries remain about the nature of their interiors: Do crushed neutrons become “superfluid” and flow freely?...

Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years, is best known for an enormous eruption seen in the mid-19th century that hurled at least 10 times the sun’s mass into space. This expanding veil of gas and dust, which still shrouds Eta Carinae, makes it the only object of its kind known in our galaxy. Now a study using archival data from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes has found five objects with similar properties in other galaxies for the first time....

Brazilian astronomers have now found the first evidence of the existence of an exoplanet orbiting an older or more evolved binary in which one of the two stars is dead. The study resulted from a postdoctoral research project and a research internship abroad, both with scholarships from FAPESP. Its findings have just been published in The Astronomical Journal, owned by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Leonardo Andrade de Almeida, first author of the article, told Agência FAPESP, “We succeeded in obtaining pretty solid evidence of the existence of a giant exoplanet with a mass almost 13 times that of Jupiter [the largest planet in the Solar System] in an evolved binary system....

A team of researchers led by York Professor Patrick Hall has discovered some strange behavior occurring in distant galaxies, observing several cases of gas that is “falling” into black holes at a high velocity. “Matter falling into black holes may not sound surprising,” says Hall, “but what we found is, in fact, quite mysterious and was not predicted by current theories.” Using data from two components of a large survey of the night sky known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (specifically, the SDSS Legacy survey and the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey), Hall and colleagues found a new type of quasar in which gas appears to be heading away and possibly toward the quasar’s black hole....

Astronomers have discovered the shortest-ever gamma-ray burst (GRB) caused by the implosion of a massive star. Using the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, astronomers identified the cause of this 0.6-second flurry of gamma rays as a supernova explosion in a distant galaxy. GRBs caused by supernovae are usually more than twice as long, which suggests that some short GRBs might actually be imposters — supernova-produced GRBs in disguise....

The supernova, known as SN1987A, was first seen by observers in the Southern Hemisphere in 1987 when a giant star suddenly exploded at the edge of a nearby dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. In the two and a half decades since then the remnant of Supernova 1987A has continued to be a focus for researchers the world over, providing a wealth of information about one of the Universe’s most extreme events....

The alternative explanation to the so-called ‘Planet Nine’ hypothesis, put forward by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the American University of Beirut, proposes a disc made up of small icy bodies with a combined mass as much as ten times that of Earth. When combined with a simplified model of the solar system, the gravitational forces of the hypothesized disc can account for the unusual orbital architecture exhibited by some objects at the outer reaches of the solar system....

“These planets have a permanent day side and a permanent night side,” said Ana Lobo, a postdoctoral researcher in the UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy who led the new work, which was just published on March 16 in The Astrophysical Journal. Lobo added that such planets are particularly common because they exist around stars that make up about 70 percent of the stars seen in the night sky – so-called M-dwarf stars, which are relatively dimmer than our sun....

Over the years, the spacefaring nations of Earth have sent dozens of probes and rovers to explore Mars. Today there are three active satellites circling the red planet while two rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, wheel across the red sands below. Mars is dry, barren, and apparently lifeless. Soon, those assets could find themselves exploring a very different kind of world. “There is a small but non-negligible chance that Comet 2013 A1 will strike Mars next year in October of 2014,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program at JPL....

UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science. The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth. There is nothing in between. “In other star systems, there are many planets with masses in that gap....

Concrete is a porous material with capillary pores that allow water to permeate into the material. For places that experience large temperature swings, concrete roads and buildings go through “freeze-thaw cycles.” The water freezes and expands inside of the material, building up pressure as the ice crystals grow, eventually popping the surface of the concrete off. The polyethylene glycol-graft-polyvinyl alcohol (PEG-PVA) molecules that the researchers have identified appear to keep the ice crystals small and prevent them from coalescing into larger crystals....

When supermassive black holes have tantrums, galaxies sit up and take notice. A group of scientists announced they had detected the gamma rays from a phenomenon known as an ultra-fast outflow—a powerful wind launched from very near a supermassive black hole—for the first time. These outflows, according to scientists, are crucial in controlling how fast the black hole and its host galaxy grow. Researchers have discovered gamma rays from ultra-fast outflows in a number of nearby galaxies using data collected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and a stacking approach that combines signals too weak to be noticed separately....

A unique atomic-scale engineering technique for turning low-efficiency photocatalytic “white” nanoparticles of titanium dioxide into high-efficiency “black” nanoparticles could be the key to clean energy technologies based on hydrogen. Samuel Mao, a scientist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division and the University of California at Berkeley, leads the development of a technique for engineering disorder into the nanocrystalline structure of the semiconductor titanium dioxide. This turns the naturally white crystals black in color, a sign that the crystals are now able to absorb infrared as well as visible and ultraviolet light....

Cancer is lethal because it spreads, or metastasizes, and curing cancer depends on knowing just how this process works. Cornell biomedical engineers have uncovered a groundbreaking link between the body’s natural inflammatory response, and how malignant breast cancer cells use the bloodstream to metastasize. Their work, published online on January 23 in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, contends that pro-inflammatory signaling molecules in blood called cytokines constitute a “switch” that induces the mechanism by which breast cancer cells “roll” and adhere to the blood vessel surface....

An international team of researchers has demonstrated an innovative technique for increasing the intensity of lasers. In a paper that made the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters, an international team of researchers has demonstrated an innovative technique for increasing the intensity of lasers. This approach, based on the compression of light pulses, would make it possible to reach a threshold intensity for a new type of physics that has never been explored before: quantum electrodynamics phenomena....

Cardenas discovered the region – which he calls “Soda Springs” – while studying how groundwater from a nearby island could affect the ocean environment of the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines. The passage is one of the most diverse marine ecosystems in the world and is home to thriving coral reefs. The amazing bubbling location, which Cardenas captured on video (embedded below), is not a climate change nightmare. It is linked to a nearby volcano that vents out the gases through cracks in the ocean floor and has probably been doing so for decades or even millennia....

Betacoronaviruses, including those that caused the SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 pandemics, are a specific type of coronaviruses that infect humans and animals. The new vaccine works to induce the production of a broad spectrum of cross-reactive antibodies by presenting the immune system with pieces of the spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and seven other SARS-like betacoronaviruses, attached to a protein nanoparticle structure. Notably, when vaccinated with this so-called mosaic nanoparticle, animal models were protected from an additional coronavirus, SARS-CoV, which was not one of the eight represented on the nanoparticle vaccine....

Their findings were recently published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. A few years back, the National Institutes of Mental Health initiated a multi-billion-dollar research project aimed at identifying biomarkers of brain activity that reveal the biological basis of various mental health disorders. Currently, these disorders are mainly diagnosed through clinical evaluation based on a patient’s reported symptoms, which often overlap with each other. “The idea is to forget classification of disease by symptoms and find underlying biological causes,” said Yale’s Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, professor of psychiatry and psychology and senior author of the study....

The data that enabled these discoveries was collected by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), an intense observation effort that spanned six years, and was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-metre Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. As is the case for most major telescopes that receive public funding, the DES data were made available to the public....

CAPSTONE suffered an issue that caused the spacecraft to tumble beyond the capacity of the onboard reaction wheels to control and counter. This occurred during or shortly after a planned trajectory correction maneuver on September 8. After this happened, CAPSTONE was attempting to communicate with the ground for approximately 24 hours before any telemetry was recovered. After data was received, mission controllers discovered that the spacecraft was tumbling and the onboard computer systems were periodically resetting....