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.
Heavens
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.
AMES, Iowa - Not long after Marriott announced plans to buy Starwood Hotels and Resorts, a Chinese insurance group offered to sweeten the deal setting off a brief bidding war. Marriott eventually secured the merger, but only after agreeing to pay more than its original offer.
For the first time, scientists are looking at real data -- not computer models, but direct observation -- about what is happening in the fascinating region where the Earth's magnetic field breaks and then joins with the interplanetary magnetic field.
They don't know exactly what this new window of science will open to us -- that's the thrill of discovery and, for some, the scary part, too.
Pasadena, CA-- Carnegie's Allan Sandage, who died in 2012, was a tremendously influential figure in the field of astronomy. His final paper, published posthumously, focuses on unraveling a surprising historical mystery related to one of his own seminal discoveries.
While preparing a centennial history of the Carnegie Observatories in the early 2000s, Sandage came across an unpublished 1944 exchange between two prominent astronomers that piqued his interest. The conversation seemed to predate by a decade Sandage's own work on stellar evolution in the mid-1950s.
WASHINGTON, DC -- The ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa could have the necessary balance of chemical energy for life, even if the moon lacks volcanic hydrothermal activity, finds a new study.
URBANA, Ill. - Research at the University of Illinois is finding ways to make rice bran, an abundant co-product of the production of white rice for human consumption, more efficient as a feed ingredient for pigs.
In this image from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), light from blazing blue stars energises the gas left over from the stars' recent formation. The result is a strikingly colourful emission nebula, called LHA 120-N55, in which the stars are adorned with a mantle of glowing gas. Astronomers study these beautiful displays to learn about the conditions in places where new stars develop.