Are the Milky Way’s borders expanding?
Hundreds of billions of stars make up the barred spiral galaxy that we call home. The Milky Way’s 100,000 light-year diameter houses stars of different masses, luminosities, and ages, with new stars constantly being added to the mix. Star formation isn’t showing signs of slowing down, and this includes births at the outer edges of the galaxy. Could these young stars forming near the galactic edge be expanding the size of the Milky Way?
A team of researchers, led by Ph.D. candidate Cristina Martínez-Lombilla of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, presented research supporting this idea at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science on April 3.
Read full article at astronomy.com
The Woman Who Knows Everything About the Universe
In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman was busy. He was busy winning the Nobel Prize, and he was busy learning to draw. One day during that productive time in his life, he saw astrophysics student Virginia Trimble striding across Caltech’s campus and thought, There’s a good model.
Soon, she was posing for him a couple Tuesdays a month, in exchange for $5.50 each session and a lot of physics talk. She was studying a nebula, and he was, sometimes, sharing anecdotes that would later appear in one of his books, which featured everything from his bongo playing to his work on the Manhattan Project. Treatment of women in professional and academic situations has changed—and significantly so—since those sixties-California-campus days. Trimble was a student at a university that enrolled few women, in a field that enlisted few women. But her experience at Caltech wasn’t limited to sidelining model gigs. Those early days of learning and research were the beginning of a five-decade career that has turned Trimble into a powerhouse of astronomy.
72 Mysterious Cosmic Flashes Puzzle Astronomers
Images of one of the transient events, from eight days before the maximum brightness to 18 days afterward: This outburst took place 4 billion light-years from Earth.
Scientists conducting a survey for supernovas — the dramatic explosions that end the lives of massive stars — noticed 72 powerful flashes of light. The mysterious emissions were similar in brightness to supernovas, but they evolved much more rapidly, so their exact nature is unclear.
The 72 light sources appeared in the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program (DES-SN), which uses a large camera on a 13-foot (4 meters) telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes. The DES-SN is designed to help probe the nature of dark energy by measuring the expansion of the universe. While surveying the sky, it captures images of changing, or transient, events, including supernova candidates, which scientists follow up on. [Supernova Photos: Great Images of Star Explosions]
“The DES-SN survey is there to help us understand dark energy, itself entirely unexplained,” lead author Miika Pursiainen, of the University of Southampton in England, said in a statement. “That survey then also reveals many more unexplained transients than seen before.”
Read full article at www.space.com
Scientists discover the universe has much less phosphorus than we thought, potentially meaning there are fewer aliens
Scientists might have found why there are so few aliens.
Life as we know it on Earth could be far more unusual than we’ve previously thought, according to a new study.
The research suggests that the universe is substantially lacking in phosphorus.
The element is required for some of the most fundamental behaviour of life itself. It helps us store and move energy around our bodies, and forms the foundation of DNA.
But the new research suggests we’ve only got enough of it on Earth because we were close enough to a supernovae.
Phosphorus is formed as stars explode at the end of their lives. But the typical supernova might not have the right conditions to create it.
Read full article at www.independent.co.uk
AI Astronomer: Scientists Build Neural Network to Search for Habitable Planets
A team of researchers at the Center for Robotics and Neural Systems at Plymouth University in England has developed an artificially intelligent neural network trained to classify planets into five different categories based on their potential for habitability. The tool could be used in the future for interstellar space exploration.
The Plymouth University researchers presented their work on their artificial neural network (ANN) at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool, England, April 4. A neural network is like an algorithm built to learn as humans do, but capable of analysing far more data.
Astronomers Just Found They’ve Been Completely Wrong About These Giant Sun Tornadoes
Scientists have discovered that the massive bursts of solar activity we call ‘solar tornadoes’ are not at all like the twisters we get here on Earth – even though they sure appeared similar on a gigantic scale.
The term describes the enormous eruptions of gas that appear to swirl up from the Sun’s surface, but based on a new analysis of their structure, these swirls aren’t moving in the way astronomers have always assumed.
Research on the phenomenon is due to be presented at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) in Liverpool this week, correcting more than a century of thought on what were once called ‘tornado prominences’.
“They are associated with the legs of solar prominences – these are beautiful concentrations of cool plasma in the very hot solar corona that can easily be seen as pink structures during total solar eclipses,” says lead author Nicolas Labrosse from the University of Glasgow.
Read full article at www.sciencealert.com
