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…
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…
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.
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
The announcement that astronomers have found a potential alien world that could be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet is raising a big question: How will scientists confirm the existence of a true alien Earth? While NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which discovered the newfound Earth-like planet candidate KOI 172.2, is great for finding large numbers…
What if you had a “Wayback Television Set” and could watch an entire month of ancient prehistory unfold before your eyes in real time? David Rubin of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presented just such a scenario to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting when he announced the discovery of a…