Heavens

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Galaxies come in three main shapes - elliptical, spiral (such as the Milky Way) and irregular. They can be massive or small. To add to this mix, galaxies can also be blue or red. Blue galaxies are still actively forming stars. Red ones mostly are not currently forming stars, and are considered passive.

NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites provided a visible and infrared view of Typhoon Nepartak before and during its movement over Taiwan.

Scientists with NASA's Dawn mission have identified permanently shadowed regions on the dwarf planet Ceres. Most of these areas likely have been cold enough to trap water ice for a billion years, suggesting that ice deposits could exist there now.

If you thought Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, was a strange world with its two suns in the sky, imagine this: a planet where you'd either experience constant daylight or enjoy triple sunrises and sunsets each day, depending on the seasons, which happen to last longer than human lifetimes.

A team of astronomers have used the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope to image the first planet ever found in a wide orbit inside a triple-star system. The orbit of such a planet had been expected to be unstable, probably resulting in the planet being quickly ejected from the system. But somehow this one survives. This unexpected observation suggests that such systems may actually be more common than previously thought. The results will be published online in the journal Science on 7 July 2016.

The underlying reason for worsening health and declining living standards in Britain is not immigration but ever growing economic inequality and the public spending cuts that have accompanied austerity, argues an expert in The BMJ today.

Astronomers have directly detected a planet in a triple star system using imaging techniques. The planet's peculiar arrangement between three stars as well as its wide orbit within the multi-star system expand current models of how star systems and their planets form. To date, detecting exoplanets in multi-star systems has proven challenging, meaning that most directly imaged exoplanets have been detected around single stars, and less so around binary stars.

After shining for many millions of years, stars end their lives, mainly, in two ways: very high mass stars die very violently as supernovae, while low mass stars end as planetary nebulae. In both cases they throw out into the interstellar medium the chemical elements synthesized in the interiors of the stars. For that reason, knowing the composition of this gas gives us information which is vital for understanding the chemical evolution of our Galaxy, and by extension, of the universe.

Social behaviour like reaching a consensus is a matter of cooperation. However, individuals in populations often spontaneously compete and only cooperate under certain conditions. These problems are so ubiquitous that physicists have now developed models to understand the underlying logic that drives competition. A new study published in EPJ B shows the dynamics of competing agents with an evolving tendency to collaborate that are linked through a network modelled as a disordered square lattice.

Peering deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, this close-up image reveals the beating heart of one of the most historic and intensively studied remnants of a supernova, an exploding star. The inner region sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and tsunamis of charged particles embedded in magnetic fields.

A system for predicting storm damage by waves in northern areas of the North Sea has been developed by mathematicians at the University of Strathclyde.

Densely populated areas on the sea's coast are particularly vulnerable to severe wave conditions, which can rise above or damage sea defences, leading to dangerous flooding.

The Strathclyde researchers have devised a model of north-east Scottish coastal waters which simulates waves and the effect upon them of tidal currents.

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the beating heart of one of the most visually appealing, and most studied, supernova remnants known -- the Crab Nebula. At the centre of this nebula the spinning core of a deceased star breathes life into the gas that surrounds it.

The BMJ has produced a series of info-graphics to illustrate payments received by doctors, as disclosed in the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) database, launched last week.

This is a useful step towards greater transparency and public accountability, but it serves mainly to show just how far we have yet to go.

An editorial by The BMJ's Editor in Chief, Fiona Godlee and Clinical Editor, Kate Adlington, says that this database is just the start on the way towards transparency.

When it feels easy to pay for something, it might just make us feel less connected to what we're buying, a new U of T Scarborough study says.

"Debit and credit cards rule the marketplace, and while going cashless is convenient, that convenience may come at a price," says Avni Shah, an assistant professor of marketing at U of T Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.

As super typhoon Nepartak NASA satellites are gathering data on wind, temperature, rainfall, and cloud extent. NASA's Terra satellite, the Suomi NPP satellite and the RapidScat instrument have been analyzing the storm.

The RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station has been analyzing the winds around Super typhoon Nepartak. RapidScat is a scatterometer that can measure wind speeds over open ocean surfaces. RapidScat passed directly over Super Typhoon Nepartak on July 6 and read wind speeds upwards of 27 meters per second (60.4 mph/97.2 kph).