In the early days of the Solar System, baby Earth may have taken much less time to form than we previously thought. According to an analysis conducted in February 2020, there is evidence that most of the Earth took only 5 million years to come together, several times longer than …
Read More »
When you go out and look at the sky on a clear night, it seems like nothing else could be so serene and peaceful. But many of those seemingly peaceful stars are evidence of a troubled history, and now we are learning to uncover their secrets. Using data from the …
Read More »
In a giant cloud of gas and dust 1,400 light-years away, twin shadows extend through space from a star, like the vast wings of a colossal cosmic bat. Now astronomers have surprised the hit of these shadows, and are not sure what is causing it. The winged shadow, photographed using …
Read More »
A 50-year theoretical process to extract energy from a spinning black hole finally has experimental verification. Using an analogue of the required components, physicists have shown that the Penrose process is indeed a plausible mechanism for extracting some of that rotational energy, if we could ever develop the means. That …
Read More »