Dimming of supergiant star Betelgeuse more likely due to dust than imminent explosion, ESO says
Astronomers have managed to take pictures of Betelgeuse showing that the star, one of the brightest in the Milky Way, has been losing luminosity over recent months, the European Southern Observatory said on Friday. The mysterious dimming of one of the most visible stars in ...
Astronauts fix spectrometer hunting for antimatter and dark matter
Spacewalking astronauts plugged a leak in a cosmic ray detector outside the International Space Station on Saturday, completing a series of complex repairs to give the instrument new life. The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer could resume its hunt for elusive antimatter and dark matter ...
World's smallest gingerbread house sits atop teensy snowman created by Canadian researcher
There was Tiny Tim, and then the Little Drummer Boy — but they had nothing on the microscropic gingerbread house that is believed to be the smallest in the world and was unveiled Wednesday by a Canadian researcher. About half the size of one made ...
'Impossibly massive' new type of black hole spotted in our galaxy
Astronomers have discovered a black hole in the Milky Way so huge that it challenges existing models of how stars evolve, researchers said Thursday. LB-1 is 15,000 light-years from Earth and has a mass 70 times greater than the sun, according to the journal Nature. The ...
Scientists have known for decades that the universe is expanding, but research in the past few years has shaken up calculations on the speed of growth — raising tricky questions about theories of the cosmos. The rate of expansion — known as the "Hubble constant" ...
Einstein's theory of general relativity survives test from star orbiting black hole
Observations of light coming from a star zipping in orbit around the humongous black hole at the center of our galaxy have provided fresh evidence backing Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity, astronomers said on Thursday. Researchers studied a star called S0-2, boasting a ...
Solved: The 40-year mystery of what shapes black holes' disks
Scientists on Thursday unveiled the most detailed simulation of a black hole yet, solving a mystery dating back more than four decades over how the star-devouring monsters consume matter. Coming fresh on the heels of the first photo of one of the giant objects, which ...
A glimpse of starlight and hope for science
A century ago, English astronomers used a solar eclipse to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity — a revolutionary idea from a German.
A groundbreaking fusion reactor built by Chinese scientists is underscoring Beijing's determination to be at the core of clean energy technology as it eyes a fully functioning plant by 2050. Sometimes called an "artificial sun" for the sheer heat and power it produces, the doughnut-shaped ...
U.K. and Japan scientists probe radioactive particles from Fukushima meltdowns
Eight years after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, radioactive particles collected from the site are undergoing new forensic investigation in Britain in an effort to understand the exact sequence of events. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, off the Japanese coast, triggering tsunami ...
NASA captures unprecedented images of supersonic shock waves with help of 'rock star' pilots
NASA has captured unprecedented photos of the interaction of shock waves from two supersonic aircraft, part of its research into developing planes that can fly faster than sound without thunderous "sonic booms." When an aircraft crosses that threshold — around 1,225 kph (760 mph) at ...
Scientists spend too much time on the old
Spending billions on a huge particle collider won't give us the breakthrough discoveries we need.
