The Biggest Thing in the Universe Is Really, Really Big
A newly discovered galactic structure is so large that it means one of our basic assumptions about the nature of the universe could be wrong.
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The Oldest Rock in the World Tells Us a Story
It’s hard to imagine how this teeny little rock — it’s not even a whole rock, it’s just a grain, a miniscule droplet of mineral barely the thickness of a human hair — could rewrite the history of our planet. But that’s what seems to be happening. This piece of Zircon, an extremely durable mineral…
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Mystery Cloud at Milky Way’s Center May Hold Clues to Star Birth
Near the crowded center of a mysteriously dense galactic cloud, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun — a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second — one…
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Anatomy ‘Wrong’ in Early Animals
Textbooks might have to be re-written when it comes to some of the earliest creatures, a study suggests. Researchers have found that our understanding of the anatomy of the first four-legged animals is wrong. New 3D models of fossil remains show that previous renderings of the position of the beasts’ backbones were actually back-to-front. The…
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The Iron in Our Blood That Keeps and Kills Us
In this search for the origin of one of the world’s most common genetic diseases, emerging research in evolutionary medicine raises new questions about our history, development, and future as a species.
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Astronomers Find Largest Structure in the Universe
An international team of astronomers has found the largest known structure in the universe – a group of quasars four billion light years across. Quasars are the nuclei of extremely ancient galaxies that can flare up brightly, making them visible across huge distances, for comparatively brief period of between 10 and 100 million years. They…
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Alien Moons Could Be as Habitable as Exoplanets
Astronomers say they’re hot on the trail of real-life alien moons — which could also potentially be viable candidates for habitable worlds, researchers say. Astronomers have found roughly 850 known alien worlds. And as recently announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting, the Kepler spacecraft has picked up 2,740 candidate planets since its 2009 launch….
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Data Confirms Largest-Known Spiral Galaxy
An international team of astronomers says analysis of NASA data on a distant stellar system has led them to crown it the largest-known spiral galaxy. The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872, long ranked among the biggest observed stellar systems, spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our…
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Archeologists in Egypt Unearth 3000-Year-Old Tombs
Egypt’s Antiquities Minister says Italian archaeologists have unearthed tombs over 3000 years old in the ancient city of Luxor. Mohammed Ibrahim says the discovery was made beneath the mortuary temple of King Amenhotep II, seventh Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty who reigned from 1427 to 1401 B.C. The temple is located on the western bank…
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We Likely Wouldn’t See a Doomsday Asteroid Until it Was Too Late
How much warning will we really have if a Near Earth Asteroid (NEO) is about to hit Earth? The answer is pretty grim. “With so many of even the larger NEOs remaining undiscovered, the most likely warning today would be zero,” NASA informs us. We would see nothing at all until suddenly, just as the…