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+7 +1
Parts of the moon have stable temperatures fit for humans, researchers find
Hoping to live on the moon one day? Your chances just got a tiny bit better. The moon has pits and caves where temperatures stay at roughly 63 degrees Fahrenheit, making human habitation a possibility, according to new research from planetary scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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+13 +2
Astronomers witness the rare break up of a star couple
Astronomers have witnessed a rare and important life event in the evolution of binary star couplings for the first time. The team discovered a tight binary star surrounded by an expanding shell of material. This shell is matter is leftover from a stage in the stars' evolution called the common envelope phase.
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+14 +4
A new Record for the Strongest Magnetic Field Seen in the Universe: 1.6 Billion Tesla
A team of astronomers using the Chinese Insight-HXMT x-ray telescope have made a direct measurement of the strongest magnetic field in the known universe. The magnetic field belongs to a magnetar currently in the process of cannibalizing an orbiting companion.
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+4 +1
Earth-like planets in dead star 'cosmic graveyards' get stranger
The first world found orbiting a pulsar is rarer than previously believed, deepening the mystery of how planets survive around violent dead stars.
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+17 +3
Citizen scientist leads discovery of 34 ultracool dwarf binaries using data archive
A citizen scientist has searched NSF's NOIRLab's catalog of 4 billion celestial objects, known as NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2, to reveal brown dwarfs with companions. His intensive investigation led to the discovery of 34 ultracool dwarf binary systems, nearly doubling previously known samples.
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+23 +2
Fastest-growing black hole ever seen is devouring the equivalent of 1 Earth per second
The fastest-growing black hole ever seen is swallowing the mass equivalent of an entire Earth every second. This gargantuan black hole has a mass 3 billion times that of the sun, and its rapid consumption is causing the behemoth to grow rapidly, an international research team found. The black hole gorges via a process called accretion, in which it siphons matter from a thin disk of gas and dust rotating around the massive object.
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+15 +1
Community Scientists Rediscover Orchid Last Observed in Vermont 120 Years Ago
In the over three decades that Bob Popp has been traipsing through the Vermont woods as the state’s botanist, he had never encountered a small whorled pogonia within the state. He had seen the yellowish-green orchid on excursions to other states, but never in Vermont, where the flower had been considered locally extinct since 1902. Despite its vast range within the U.S. from Missouri and Michigan up through Maine, the species has been considered threatened by federal wildlife officials since 1982.
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+4 +1
Physicists discover never-before seen particle sitting on a tabletop
Researchers have discovered a new particle that is a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson. Whereas the discovery of the Higgs boson required the tremendous particle-accelerating power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this never-before-seen particle — dubbed the axial Higgs boson — was found using an experiment that would fit on a small kitchen countertop.
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+3 +1
Giant Sinkhole in China Reveals Massive Ancient Forest
Cave explorers in the Guangxi region of China have found a secret ancient forest hidden inside a 630-foot-deep sinkhole. As seen in a Twitter video posted by the China state-affiliated media organization CGTN earlier this month, the karst sinkhole — formed by rainwater that dissolves bedrock — exceeds 5 million cubic meters in area.
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+13 +3
Watch the Event Horizon Telescope's 'groundbreaking' Milky Way discovery reveal online this week
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has spotted something incredible in the Milky Way galaxy — something its team is calling "groundbreaking." But what exactly that discovery is, we won't find out until Thursday (May 12).
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+18 +3
Astronomers discover asteroid treasure trove in old Hubble Space Telescope data
Astronomers have revealed the trails of nearly 1,500 new asteroids hidden in data gathered by NASA's most venerable space telescope. In a new study, astronomers and a team of amateur scientists have worked together to comb through archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The project began on International Asteroid Day in 2019, when a team of astronomers launched the "Hubble Asteroid Hunter" project on Zooniverse, a popular platform for crowdsourcing science. The project's aim was to identify asteroids in old data from Hubble; signals that, in other studies, might have just been filtered out as noise.
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+21 +2
Scientists Discover Unexplained Abundance of Rare Nuclear Fusion Fuel on Earth
Scientists have discovered evidence that a key rare resource, called helium-3, is potentially ten times more common on Earth than previously known—though the source of all this extra supply remains mysterious, reports a new study. The finding is important because helium-3 could serve as a foundation of limitless clean power for our civilization, but has been seen as inaccessible since it is largely found in outer space locations, especially the Moon.
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+16 +5
Scientists discover a giant groundwater system under the ice sheet in Antarctica
Have you ever stared at the long ice sheets in the Antarctic and wondered what lies beneath? Now, Columbia University researchers have explored this question and found an answer that may surprise you, according to a study published in Science on Thursday.
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+14 +3
Could this pottery shard be a 1,000-year-old hand grenade? Signs point to yes
Archaeologists have analyzed the residue inside four medieval ceramic shards and determined that one of them may have been used as a hand grenade, according to a recent paper published in the journal PLOS One. And the explosive used was likely made locally rather than gunpowder imported from China.
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+11 +2
‘Fish lizard’ fossils found in Swiss Alps showcase some of the largest creatures to ever live
Long-extinct "fish lizards" first appeared in the ocean about 250 million years ago, and their fossils were found high in the Swiss Alps. According to a study published Thursday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the fossil discovery of the marine reptile carnivores, known as ichthyosaurs, make them some the largest creatures to ever live on Earth – even bigger than sperm whales and on par with dinosaurs – given that they weighed about 80 tons and spanned 65 feet.
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+12 +1
This particle's heft could hint at a crack in physics’ standard model
There’s something amiss with a mass. A new measurement of the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, has defied expectations. The result hints at a possible flaw in physicists’ otherwise stalwart theory of the fundamental bits and bobs of our world, known as the standard model.
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+18 +3
‘Unusual’ deep-sea jellyfish discovered off California coast
Scientists have discovered an “unusual” new species of deep-sea jellyfish living in the waters off the California coast. The creature, a type of Atolla jellyfish, was discovered by scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). It lives in the so-called midnight zone of the ocean – between one and four kilometers deep – a mysterious region where light only comes from animals that produce it themselves and the pressure reaches 5,580 pounds a square inch.
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+16 +2
Astronomers discover micronovae, a new kind of stellar explosion
A team of astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion—a micronova. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars, and can each burn through around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza of stellar material in only a few hours.
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+21 +4
Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star
Astronomers have discovered a third planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun. Called Proxima Centauri d, the newly spotted world is probably smaller than Earth, and could have oceans of liquid water. “It’s showing that the nearest star probably has a very rich planetary system,” says Guillem Anglada-Escudé, an astronomer at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, who led the team that, in 2016, discovered the first planet to be seen orbiting Proxima Centauri.
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+18 +4
Earth’s purported ‘nearest black hole’ isn’t a black hole
The nearest black hole to Earth isn’t a black hole at all. Instead, what scientists thought was a stellar triplet — two stars and a black hole — is actually a pair of stars caught in a unique stage of evolution.
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