Heavens

The origin of many of the most precious elements on the periodic table, such as gold, silver and platinum, has perplexed scientists for more than six decades. Now a recent study has an answer, evocatively conveyed in the faint starlight from a distant dwarf galaxy.

In a roundtable discussion, published today, The Kavli Foundation spoke to two of the researchers behind the discovery about why the source of these heavy elements, collectively called "r-process" elements, has been so hard to crack.

During May 2016 the Earth and Mars get closer to each other than at any time in the last ten years. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has exploited this special configuration to catch a new image of our red neighbour, showing some of its famous surface features. This image supplements previous Hubble observations of Mars and allows astronomers to study large-scale changes on its surface.

An international team of astronomers have found evidence of ice and comets orbiting a nearby sun-like star, which could give a glimpse into how our own solar system developed.

Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, detected very low levels of carbon monoxide gas around the star, in amounts that are consistent with the comets in our own solar system.

Using recent advancements in Australian telescope technology, a Monash University-led research team has made an unexpected discovery that a large group of stars are dying prematurely, challenging our accepted view of stellar evolution.

Some supernovae have a reserve tank of radioactive fuel that cuts in and powers their explosions for three times longer than astronomers had previously thought.

A team of astronomers jointly led by Dr Ivo Seitenzahl from The Australian National University (ANU) detected the faint afterglow of a supernova, and found it was powered by radioactive cobalt-57.

The discovery gives important new clues about the causes of Type Ia supernovae, which astronomers use to measure vast distances across the Universe.

Astronomers have detected a sub-stellar object that used to be a star, after being consumed by its white dwarf companion.

An international team of astronomers made the discovery by observing a very faint binary system, J1433 which is located 730 light-years away. The system consists of a low-mass object - about 60 times the mass of Jupiter - in an extremely tight 78-minute orbit around a white dwarf (the remnant of a star like our Sun).

V404 Cygni is a black hole within a binary system located in the constellation of Cygnus. In such systems, of which less than 50 are known, a black hole of around 10 times the mass of the Sun is swallowing material from a very nearby star, its companion star. During this process material falls onto the black hole and forms an accretion disc, whose hotter, innermost zones emit in X-rays.

NASA successfully launched a super pressure balloon (SPB) from Wanaka Airport, New Zealand, at 11:35 a.m. Tuesday, May 17, 2016 (7:35 p.m. EDT Monday, May 16, 2016) on a potentially record-breaking, around-the-world test flight.

The purpose of the flight is to test and validate the SPB technology with the goal of long-duration flight (100+ days) at mid-latitudes. In addition, the gondola is carrying the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) gamma-ray telescope as a mission of opportunity.

It has been one hundred years since the publication of Einstein's general theory of relativity in May 1916. In a paper recently published in EPJ Plus, Norwegian physicist Øyvind Grøn from the Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences and his co-author Torkild Jemterud demonstrate that the rotational motion in the universe is also subject to the theory of relativity.

Astronomers at Queen's University Belfast will lead the UK's efforts to search for exploding stars, comets and potentially hazardous asteroids using the world's largest digital camera.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is currently being built in the Chilean Andes. The 3.2 billion pixels telescope will be used by an international team of astronomers to take images of the sky that each cover over 40 times the area of the moon, building up a survey of the entire visible sky in just three nights.

Hamilton, ON (May 18, 2016) - Children with autism have a wide range of ability to talk with other people, but it has been difficult to group children by their specific skills.

Now researchers at the CanChild Centre for Childhood Disability Research at McMaster University have developed an autism classification system that defines levels of social communications ability among those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

This new system will allow the child's care team to understand and work to improve the child's communication with others in everyday life.

The Earth's albedo, or reflectance, is a fundamental atmospheric parameter having deep implications for temperature and climate change. For that reason, experiments have been performed to monitor it over the past two decades to reveal how it evolves. One of these, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias is a participant, has brought up to date the observations made since 2007 and adds to, and gives a new systematic record of the Earth's albedo covering the period between 1998 and 2014 from California.

Looking up at the night sky -- expansive and seemingly endless, stars and constellations blinking and glimmering like jewels just out of reach -- it's impossible not to wonder: Are we alone?

For many of us, the notion of intelligent life on other planets is as captivating as ideas come. Maybe in some other star system, maybe a billion light years away, there's a civilization like ours asking the exact same question.

Imagine if we sent up a visible signal that could eventually be seen across the entire universe. Imagine if another civilization did the same.

Berkeley, CA -- Solar power could deliver $400 billion in environmental and public health benefits throughout the United States by 2050, according to a study from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

It is well known that the dog days of summer in St. Louis are hot, humid and hazy. On the warmest of these days, the air arrives from the south, bringing with it high temperatures, moisture and natural forest emissions of chemicals, known as hydrocarbons, from the Ozark Plateau. The hydrocarbons can interact with human-influenced emissions, and in the presence of sunlight, create a cocktail of pollutants -- including ozone -- that are hazardous to human health.