Life-bearing planets may exist in vast numbers in the space between stars in our Milky Way galaxy. An international team of researchers argue a few hundred thousand billion free-floating Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars. Writing in the journal Astrophysics and Space Science, they propose the planets originated in the early universe…
Cambridge archaeologists working in Turkey have found the evidence for a previously unknown ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire. The archaeologists working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan, believe that this language may have been spoken by deportees…
International diversity is just as important as diversity of discipline when it comes to scientific discovery
“Shocking” find may redraw picture of solar system’s cosmic shield.
Archaeologists have found a small room in Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago. The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Scientists already knew they must have been keeping such records at…
One of Europe’s main contributions to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is built and ready to ship to the US. The Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri) will gather key data as the $9 billion observatory seeks to identify the first starlight in the Universe. James Webb – regarded as the successor to Hubble – is due…
Not long ago, the story was simple. A vanguard of modern humans left their African birthplace 50,000–60,000 years ago and quickly conquered Asia. They turned left into Europe some 40,000 years ago, later crossing the Bering Strait and marching southward into the Americas. With their advance, Neanderthals and other earlier peoples dwindled and vanished. But…
The intense energy and winds from gigantic black holes can block the birth of stars as scientists have long suspected, a new analysis of distant galaxies reveals. Most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are thought to have supermassive black holes at their hearts. Some of these monster black holes are relatively calm, but others,…
A team of American, Canadian and Chilean astronomers have stumbled onto a remarkably faint cluster of stars orbiting the Milky Way that puts out as much light as only 120 modest Sun-like stars. The tiny cluster, called Munoz 1, was discovered near a dwarf galaxy in a survey of satellites around the Milky Way using…
Since its launch in 2008, the Fermi space telescope has recorded hundreds of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), flashes of light that, for just a few seconds or minutes, are the brightest objects in the Universe. And now the telescope is yielding data that is starting to explain the mechanisms that unleash these beam-like jets of light,…