Blasting over two million lights years from the centre of a distant galaxy is a supersonic jet of material that looks strikingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet, except in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is moving at nearly the speed of light….
NASA astronomers have discovered a stunning trend in galaxy evolution, according to a report from the space agency. The stunning trend in galaxy evolution goes back 8 billion years, say astronomers who looked at numerous galaxies through the Keck telescopes and NASA’s Space Telescope. “Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into…
A special issue of Nature examines the changing global landscape of research.
Cosmologists are uncovering relics from the dawn of time, letting them look back almost all the way to the Big Bang.
Extinctions during the early Triassic period left Earth a virtual wasteland, largely because life literally couldn’t take the heat, a new study suggests. Between 247 to 252 million years ago, Earth was reeling from a mass extinction called the end-Permian event. The die-off had wiped out most life on Earth, including most land plants. The…
Researchers from China’s Fudan University have found major prehistoric human population expansions may have begun before the Neolithic period, which probably led to the introduction of agriculture. Major prehistoric human population expansions in three continents may have begun before the Neolithic period — around 15-11,000 years ago in Africa, from around 13,000 years ago in…
It’s long been theorized that the moon was created when a Mars-sized proto-planet slammed into the Earth. Unfortunately, though, the chemistry of the two bodies has stubbornly failed to bear this out. Now, though, two very different models of such a collision have been developed, both explaining satisfactorily – but incompatibly – how the Earth-moon…
Researchers at the University of Manchester say they have discovered a 16 million-year-old springtail hitchhiking on the wings of mayflies. Researchers say that a CT scan of amber has revealed the very first evidence of any creature hitchhiking on the wings of an adult mayfly. Tiny springtails are likely using mayflies for transportation today, researchers…
Astronomers have taken their first 3D look at a gigantic filament of dark matter, an invisible cosmic structure that can only be detected by its gravitational effects it has on its surroundings. The universe is thought to be structured like a tangled web, with long strings of mostly dark matter intersecting at giant galaxy clusters….
University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists have identified what they think is the ancestral trait that allowed for the evolution of air breathing in vertebrates. “To breathe air with a lung you need more than a lung, you need neural circuitry that is sensitive to carbon dioxide,” said Michael Harris, lead researcher of a team that…