The sight of an asteroid being ripped apart by a dead star and forming a glowing debris ring has been captured in an image for the first time.
Comprised of dust particles and debris, the rings are formed by the star's gravity tearing apart asteroids that came too close.
Gas produced by collisions among the debris within the ring is illuminated by ultraviolet rays from the star, causing it to emit a dark red glow which the researchers observed and turned into the image of the ring.
Led by Christopher Manser, a PhD student at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, the team used data from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other observatories to study the shattered remains of an asteroid around a stellar remnant -- a white dwarf (called SDSS J1228+1040) [1].
The long, shallow grooves lining the surface of Phobos are likely early signs of the structural failure that will ultimately destroy this moon of Mars.
Orbiting a mere 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above the surface of Mars, Phobos is closer to its planet than any other moon in the solar system. Mars' gravity is drawing in Phobos, the larger of its two moons, by about 6.6 feet (2 meters) every hundred years. Scientists expect the moon to be pulled apart in 30 to 50 million years.
The planet Mercury is being pelted regularly by bits of dust from an ancient comet, a new study has concluded. This has a discernible effect in the planet's tenuous atmosphere and may lead to a new paradigm on how these airless bodies maintain their ethereal envelopes.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 10, 2015 -- It's a big week for gamers now that the long-anticipated Fallout 4 video game is being released. The series takes place in a world decades after nuclear war has destroyed most of civilization. Only those who hid in fallout shelters survived. While this idea works in a fictional game universe, could humans really survive for years or even decades in such a shelter? This week, Reactions looks at the basics of survival in a world riddled with radiation.
A presentation by human factors/ergonomics researchers at the HFES 2015 International Annual Meeting in Los Angeles in October explained how a voter's positive or negative experience with a particular voting system is influenced not only by perceptions of trust and aesthetics but also by the polling environment itself.
Recent experiments at the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) at the University of California, Los Angeles, have successfully excited elusive plasma waves, known as whistler-mode chorus waves, which have hitherto only been observed in the Earth's near-space environment. These chorus waves were accidentally discovered as early as World War I by radio operators deploying long lines intended to intercept enemy communication, and were subsequently dubbed "dawn chorus" since the sound of the radio signal when played through loudspeakers sounded like the distant chirping of a rookery of birds.
Since the late 1980s, scientists have discovered nearly 5,000 planetary bodies orbiting stars other than the sun. But astronomers are still working on what exactly we should call them.
Today at an American Astronomical Society meeting, UCLA professor Jean-Luc Margot described a simple test that can be used to clearly separate planets from other bodies like dwarf planets and minor planets.
Tropical Cyclone Megh became the second tropical cyclone to make landfall in Yemen in one week. As Megh began land falling just north of Aden, Yemen, NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead and captured an image of the tropical storm over the southeastern coast.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Most Head Start classrooms serve children of mixed ages and that hurts the academic growth of older children, a new national study suggests.
Researchers found that 4-year-olds in Head Start classrooms that included higher concentrations of 3-year-olds were up to five months behind in academic development compared with their peers in classrooms with fewer younger children.
The results of an opportunistic, pilot-scale study led by Virginia Wotring of the Center for Space Medicine and Department of Pharmacology at Baylor College of Medicine in the U.S. suggest that medication degradation on the International Space Station (ISS) does not differ from what is typically seen on Earth. The study, which used medicine samples sent back to Earth from the ISS, appears in The AAPS Journal, an official journal of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, published by Springer.
The results of an opportunistic, pilot-scale study led by Virginia Wotring of the Center for Space Medicine and Department of Pharmacology at Baylor College of Medicine in the US suggest that medication degradation on the International Space Station (ISS) does not differ from what is typically seen on Earth. The study, which used medicine samples sent back to Earth from the ISS, appears in The AAPS Journal, published by Springer.
Astronomers have identified for the first time one of the key components of many stars, a study suggests.
A type of gas found in the voids between galaxies - known as atomic gas - appears to be part of the star formation process under certain conditions, researchers say.
The findings overturn a long-standing theory about the conditions needed for star formation to take place - a process that happens when dense clouds of dust and gas inside galaxies collapse.
Researchers at Mount Sinai Heart conducted a qualitative study to identify factors that may affect the implementation of an integrated family-based health promotion program for children aged 3-5 years old and their caregivers in Harlem, known as the FAMILIA Project. An abstract of the study was presented this week at the American Heart Association (AHA)'s Scientific Sessions 2015 in Orlando, Florida.
When sports fans wear their lucky shirts on game day, they know it is irrational to think clothing can influence a team's performance. But they do it anyway.
Even smart, educated, emotionally stable adults believe in superstitions that they recognize are unreasonable.