Astronomers have found a way to measure the size of a black hole. Supermassive black holes reside at the center of galaxies and have gravitational forces so strong that nothing, including light, can escape from being pulled into them. By combining the power of radio dishes in three different states into a super-telescope 2,000 times…
The climate change we are currently experiencing, while disconcerting and increasingly uncomfortable, is not unprecedented when viewed through the historical prism of life on Earth. A study led by researchers from Texas A&M University’s Department of Oceanography looks back at the water cycle that affected the Western United States in an era dating back some…
NASA’s Curiosity rover has found evidence that the area in Gale crater it is traveling through once had vigorously flowing water for perhaps thousands or millions of years. Scientists don’t know exactly how long ago this river would have flowed but it would likely be billions of years in the past. Several pieces of evidence…
Supermassive black holes appear to occupy the center of almost all galaxies. When they are actively swallowing matter, these black holes can power energetic jets that shine brighter than the entire rest of the galaxy, and can shoot matter free of it. Despite the mass and energy involved, however, the origin of these jets has…
An ancient Buddhist statue that was recovered by a Nazi expedition in the 1930s was originally carved from a highly valuable meteorite. Researchers say the 1,000-year-old object with a swastika on its stomach is made from a rare form of iron with a high content of nickel. They believe it is part of the Chinga…
A group of Japanese scientists announced that they have finally synthesized the elusive element 113, which has been called ununtrium. If confirmed, the feat would mark the first time Japanese researchers have been first to synthesize an element of the periodic table. It would also be the first time an Asian research team has had…
An 8.7 earthquake that struck west of Indonesia on April 11 was the biggest of its kind ever recorded and confirms suspicions that a giant tectonic plate is breaking up, scientists believe. The quake, caused by an unprecedented quadruple-fault rupture, gave Earth’s crustal mosaic such a shock that it unleashed quakes around the world nearly…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has produced one of its most extraordinary views of the Universe to date. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, the picture captures a mass of galaxies stretching back almost to the time when the first stars began to shine. But this was no simple point and snap – some of the…
Microorganisms that crashed to Earth embedded in the fragments of distant planets might have been the sprouts of life on this one, according to new research from Princeton Univ., the Univ. of Arizona and the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain. The researchers report in the journal Astrobiology that under certain conditions there is a high…
Researchers at the University of Washington have determined that “some” microbial life migrated from the Earth’s oceans to land some 2.75 billion years ago. However, a number of scientists continue to hypothesize that such land-based life was limited – at least initially – because the ozone layer that shields against ultraviolet radiation didn’t form until…