Bizarre Alien Planets Get Cozy With Each Other
A duo of planets some 1,200 light years from earth have been spotted passing within 1.2 million miles of each other, closer than any other known pair of planets, a new study has found.
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A Windy Early Universe
The early universe was a vastly different place from the one we see today. No stars burned in faraway galaxies — there weren’t any galaxies. Instead, photons were trapped in a dance with the hot plasma of protons and electrons that suffused the universe. Sound waves rang out across this primordial soup, sloshing gas and…
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Probe Reveals Ice Content of Moon’s Shackleton Crater
Up to 22 percent of the surfaces of Shackleton Crater, located near the moon’s south pole, may be water ice, new findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show. That may sound like a lot, but it adds up to only about 100 gallons of water inside the 12-mile wide, two-mile deep crater. “It’s not a…
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Once-Green Sahara Hosted Early African Dairy Farms
The sandy dunes of the Sahara may seem an unlikely place for a dairy farm, but about 7,000 years ago, herders tended and milked cattle in what is now desolate desert, new research shows. About 10,000 years ago, the Sahara desert went through a phase called the Holocene African Humid Period. Fossilized bones show that…
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Euclid Mission to Probe Universe’s Darkest Secrets Approved
The first-ever mission dedicated to looking for dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities believed to explain the composition of the universe as we know it, will be launched in 2020, the European Space Agency said. The 800-million-euro ($1-billion) Euclid project will use a satellite employing a 1.2-metre (four-foot) diameter telescope and special cameras…
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Potential Cracks in the Standard Model of Particle Physics
Recently analyzed data from the BaBar experiment may suggest possible flaws in the Standard Model of particle physics, the reigning description of how the universe works on subatomic scales. The data from BaBar, a high-energy physics experiment based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, show that a particular type of…
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What the Amazon Looked Like Before Columbus
Ancient people had minimal, if any, impact on the outlying forests of South America’s Amazon Basin, and settlements near rivers were likely limited, indicates a new study of soil collected from the western and central Amazon. Previous research has suggested that, prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and Europeans, indigenous people built dense, complex…
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Now That’s a Fossil: Turtles Died During Sex 47 Million Years Ago
German palaeontologists have dug up the remains of nine turtle pairs that died while mating some 47 million years ago, sinking into poisonous waters while locked in a final embrace, according to a report in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. The find represents the first-ever fossil record of copulating vertebrates. “Millions of animals live…
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Missing Neutrons May Be Visiting Parallel Universe
Neutrons may be traveling from our universe into parallel worlds and back again, according to a new theory that explains a rather odd phenomenon. Experiments at ultra-low temperatures carried out by Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin in France have revealed a phenomenon known as neutron loss, whereby neutrons appear to vanish for short periods….
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Findings of Deep-Sea ‘Alien’ Hunt Revealed
Swedish explorers have put to rest speculation of a spaceship at the bottom of the Baltic — but they’re adding fuel to the ‘what is it’ mystery of this deep-sea object anyway. Digital pictures FoxNews.com has obtained from the team show that the object, located beneath the waves of the Baltic between Sweden and Finland,…