For the first time, three detectors have tracked the gravitational waves emitted by a merger of two black holes -- a critical new capability that allows scientists to more closely locate a gravitational wave's birthplace in space. Gravitational waves are ripples in space and time created when two massive, compact objects such as black holes merge.
Heavens
Using the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a team of researchers has calculated a fundamental property of protons and neutrons, known as the nucleon axial coupling, with groundbreaking precision.
Led by Andre Walker-Loud of the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the project also used computing resources at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered microbes living in a toxic volcanic lake that may rank as one of the harshest environments on Earth. Their findings, published recently online, could guide scientists looking for signs of ancient life on Mars.
The SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile allows astronomers to suppress the brilliant light of nearby stars in order to obtain a better view of the regions surrounding them. This collection of new SPHERE images is just a sample of the wide variety of dusty discs being found around young stars.
In 2016, University of California, Berkeley, engineers demonstrated the first implanted, ultrasonic neural dust sensors, bringing closer the day when a Fitbit-like device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time. Now, Berkeley engineers have taken neural dust a step forward by building the smallest volume, most efficient wireless nerve stimulator to date.
BOSTON -- Researchers from Hebrew SeniorLife's Institute for Aging Research (IFAR), Wageningen University, Tilburg University, University of Reading, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have discovered that higher intake of dairy foods, such as milk, yogurt, and cheese, is associated with higher volumetric bone mineral density and vertebral strength at the spine in men. Dairy intake seems to be most beneficial for men over age 50, and continued to have positive associations irrespective of serum vitamin D status.
NASA's Project Mercury was the United States' first human-in-space program. Between 1961 and 1963, six astronauts carried out successful one-person spaceflights that offered physicians and scientists the first opportunity to observe the effects of living in space on the human body.
Nuclear fusion, the process that powers our sun, happens when nuclear reactions between light elements produce heavier ones. It's also happening - at a smaller scale - in a Colorado State University laboratory.
You can't see well without lenses that can focus, whether those lenses are in your eye or the microscope you peer through. An innovative new way to focus beams of neutrons might allow scientists to probe the interiors of opaque objects at a size range they were blind to previously, allowing them to explore the innards of objects from meteorites to cutting-edge manufactured materials without damaging them.
Space weather emitted by Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun, may make that system rather inhospitable to life after all.
Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of astronomers discovered that a powerful stellar flare erupted from Proxima Centauri last March. This finding, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, raises questions about the habitability of our solar system's nearest exoplanetary neighbor, Proxima b, which orbits Proxima Centauri.
What causes the accelerating expansion of our universe?
Solve that mystery and you reconcile two successful, yet incompatible, theories that explain how our universe works: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But it isn't that simple. It may be that space-time itself is relative and if we zoomed in – way in – on the universe, we would realize it’s made up of constantly fluctuating space and time.
An exotic binary star system 380 light-years away has been identified as a white dwarf pulsar – yet those were believed not to exist anywhere in the universe.
Which means we still don't even know what we don't know.
White pulsars were discovered in the 1960s and associated with neutron stars.
Mars' largest moon, Phobos, has captured public imagination and been shrouded in mystery for decades. But numerical simulations recently conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shed some light on the enigmatic satellite.
The nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (called Proxima b) in its habitable zone but the star seems nothing like our sun. It's a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the sun. However, new research shows that it is sunlike in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots.
With one billion stars mapped in a thousand days, European researchers have shown that they are not afraid to tackle the most daunting tasks. The work was carried out by 450 researchers from 25 European countries, including around a hundred scientists from France, mainly at the CNRS, Observatoire de Paris and Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur[1], with major participation by the French space agency CNES.