Washington, DC-- Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars. They're stars' dim, low-mass siblings and they fade in brightness over time. They're fascinating to astronomers for a variety of reasons, but much about them remains unknown. New work from a Carnegie-led team reports the distances of a number of brown dwarfs, as well as low-mass stars, in The Astronomical Journal.
Heavens
Solar material twists above the sun's surface in this close-up captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 7-8, 2016, showcasing the turbulence caused by combative magnetic forces on the sun. This spinning cloud of solar material is part of a dark filament angling down from the upper left of the frame. Filaments are long, unstable clouds of solar material suspended above the sun's surface by magnetic forces. SDO captured this video in wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light, which is typically invisible to our eyes, but is colorized here in red for easy viewing.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Around 4.6 billion years ago, the universe was a chaos of collapsing gas and spinning debris. Small particles of gas and dust clumped together into larger and more massive meteoroids that in turn smashed together to form planets. Scientists believe that shortly after their formation, these planets -- and particularly Mercury -- were fiery spheres of molten material, which cooled over millions of years.
Tropical Cyclone 02A developed in the Northern Indian Ocean's Arabian Sea as NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and analyzed the storm in infrared light and NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible look at the storm.
Since June 23, 2016 over two dozen people have been reported killed and hundreds of homes have been destroyed by flooding in West Virginia. Using satellite data, NASA calculated the heavy rainfall that occurred over the state.
San Antonio -- June 27, 2016 -- A Southwest Research Institute-led team has discovered an elusive, dark moon orbiting Makemake, one of the "big four" dwarf planets populating the Kuiper Belt region at the edge of our solar system. The findings are detailed in the paper "Discovery of a Makemakean Moon," published in the June 27 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology ran the huge cosmological simulations that can be used to predict the rate at which gravitational waves caused by collisions between the monster black holes might be detected.
The amplitude and frequency of these waves could reveal the initial mass of the seeds from which the first black holes grew since they were formed 13 billion years ago and provide further clues about what caused them and where they formed, the researchers said.
New calculations predict that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) will detect approximately 1,000 mergers of massive black holes annually once it achieves full sensitivity early next decade.
The prediction, published online June 22 in the journal Nature, is based on computer simulations of more than a billion evolving binary stars. The simulations are based on state-of-the-art modeling of the physics involved, informed by the most recent astronomical and astrophysical observations.
Philadelphia, PA, June 23, 2016 - The majority of snakebites are often perceived as being "illegitimate," meaning they're a result of intentional human contact such as handling a snake in captivity or attempting to kill or move a wild snake; however, little data exists regarding how snakebite victims come in contact with these venomous predators. A new study in Wilderness & Environmental Medicine analyzed media reports of snakebites in the United States.
Research teams on both sides of the Atlantic have shown that precise modeling of the universe and its contents will change the detailed understanding of the evolution of the universe and the growth of structure in it.
One hundred years after Einstein introduced general relativity, it remains the best theory of gravity, the researchers say, consistently passing high-precision tests in the solar system and successfully predicting new phenomena such as gravitational waves, which were recently discovered by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
Washington, DC-- New work from Carnegie's Peter Driscoll suggests Earth's ancient magnetic field was significantly different than the present day field, originating from several poles rather than the familiar two. It is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
It is important to diagnose the faults of rolling bearings, because they may lead to the failure of motors, and even entire system-wide problems and failures. In order to diagnose the early faults of bearings, a novel method for early diagnosis of rolling bearing faults based on resonance-based sparse signal decomposition and principal component analysis is proposed in the present paper.
WASHINGTON -- Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Australian National University have developed new technology that aims to make the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) even more sensitive to faint ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
A new study by Simon Fraser University marine ecologists Jessica Schultz, Ryan Cloutier and Isabelle Côté has discovered that a mass mortality of sea stars resulted in a domino effect on B.C.'s West Coast Howe Sound marine ecology.