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Star Formation Stops in Cores of Elliptical Galaxies First, Astronomers Say

Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 5128, also known as Centaurus A. The warped shape of NGC 5128’s disk of gas and dust is evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new star formation. At a distance of just over 11 million light-years, NGC 5128 contains the closest active galactic nucleus to Earth. The center is home for a supermassive black hole that ejects jets of high-speed gas into space, but neither the supermassive black hole or the jets are visible in this image. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage / STScI / AURA / Hubble Collaboration / R. O'Connell, University of Virginia / WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee.
Apr 17, 2015 by News Staff

A new study in the journal Science has revealed that 3 billion years after the Big Bang, elliptical galaxies still made stars on their outskirts, but no longer in their interiors. Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 5128, also known as Centaurus A. The warped shape of NGC 5128’s disk of gas and dust is evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting...

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This image shows the north pole of the dwarf planet Ceres as seen by the Dawn spacecraft on April 10, 2015. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA.

NASA’s Dawn Probe Sees North Pole of Ceres

Apr 17, 2015 by News Staff

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has returned stunning new images of the sunlit north pole of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt. This...

The artificial photosynthesis system has four general components: (i) harvesting solar energy; (ii) generating reducing equivalents; (iii) reducing carbon dioxide to biosynthetic intermediates, and (iv) producing value-added chemicals.

Scientists Create Artificial Photosynthesis System

Apr 17, 2015 by News Staff

A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute,...

The first photograph ever taken of the Bouvier’s red colobus (Piliocolobus bouvieri): an adult female and infant. Image credit: Lieven Devreese.

Bouvier’s Red Colobus Monkey Rediscovered in Congo, Photographed for First Time

Apr 17, 2015 by News Staff

It’s not often that a mammal thought extinct, appears once again in the wild. But that’s what happened to the Bouvier’s red colobus (Piliocolobus...

An octopus at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island. Image credit: University of Southern California.

Octopuses Use Unique Strategies to Coordinate Their Arms in Crawling

Apr 17, 2015 by News Staff

Octopuses can crawl in any direction relative to the body orientation, says a team of marine biologists headed by Dr Binyamin Hochner of the Hebrew University...

An artist’s concept shows MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury. Image credit: NASA.

NASA’s MESSENGER Spacecraft to Collide with Mercury in Two Weeks

Apr 16, 2015 by News Staff

NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) probe will crash into the planet at 8,750 miles per hour (3.91 km/sec),...

A close-up view of a male Osedax priapus. Scale bar - 0.3 mm. Image credit: Greg Rouse.

Prehistoric Bone-Devouring Osedax Worms Fed on Carcasses of Plesiosaurs

Apr 16, 2015 by News Staff

In a new paper in the journal Biology Letters, scientists reported fossil traces of Osedax – a genus of bone-devouring worms that both eat and inhabit...

White-cheeked macaques (Macaca leucogenys), juveniles of different age. Image credit: Cheng Li et al.

Macaca leucogenys: New Species of Macaque Discovered in Tibet

Apr 16, 2015 by News Staff

A group of scientists led by Dr Peng-fei Fan of the Dali University’s Institute of Eastern-Himalaya Biodiversity Research in Yunnan has described a new...

The gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus). Image credit: Merrill Gosho / NOAA.

Female Western Gray Whale Sets Record for Longest Mammal Migration

Apr 16, 2015 by News Staff

Varvara, a female western gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus), swam from northeastern Sakhalin Island to Mexico and back again – nearly 22,500 km...

Denisovans were probably dark-skinned, unlike the pale Neandertals. The picture shows a Neanderthal man. Image credit: Mauro Cutrona.

Scientists Explain Why Modern Humans Have Chins

Apr 16, 2015 by News Staff

Chins of anatomically modern humans don’t come from mechanical forces such as chewing, but instead result from an evolutionary adaptation involving face...

Adult male West African chimpanzee uses tree branch with modified end to stab into a cavity within a hollow tree branch that houses a Senegal bush baby he ultimately captures as his adolescent brother looks on. Image credit: J. D. Pruetz et al / Royal Society Open Science / BBC.

Female West African Chimpanzees Prefer Tool-Assisted Hunting

Apr 15, 2015 by News Staff

According to a team of scientists headed by Dr Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, female West African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes ssp. verus) hunt...

This image shows Abell 3827, a massive galaxy cluster approximately 1.3 billion light years away. The blue structures surrounding the central galaxies are gravitationally lensed views of a much more distant galaxy behind the cluster. Observations of the central four merging galaxies have provided hints that the dark matter around one of the galaxies is not moving with the galaxy itself, possibly implying dark matter-dark matter interactions of an unknown nature are occurring. Image credit: ESO.

Astronomers Observe Potential Signs of Self-Interacting Dark Matter

Apr 15, 2015 by News Staff

Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the MUSE instrument on ESO’s VLT in Chile, an international group of scientists led by Dr Richard Massey...

This image from the New Horizons shows Pluto and Charon. It was made from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers) - roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus. At this distance, neither Pluto nor Charon is well resolved by the color imager, but their distinctly different appearances can be seen. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

New Horizons Captures its First Color Image of Pluto, Charon

Apr 15, 2015 by News Staff

The Ralph color imager on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has captured a low-resolution color image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. This image...

This map of our Milky Way Galaxy shows the location of the gas giant OGLE-2014-BLG-0124Lb and other exoplanets discovered with microlensing. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers Discover Extrasolar Gas Giant 13,000 Light-Years Away

Apr 15, 2015 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Polish Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory...

This image, from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, shows the ultraluminous infrared galaxy Arp 220. Image credit: NASA / ESA / C. Wilson, McMaster University.

Search for Extraterrestrial Super-Civilizations Finds Nothing in 100,000 WISE Galaxies

Apr 15, 2015 by News Staff

Astronomers led by Roger Griffith of the Pennsylvania State University say they have found no evidence of so-called Type III Kardashev super-civilizations...

Ring inlaid with a seal depicting an Egyptian warrior with a shield and sword. Image credit: Israel Antiquities Authority, Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery.

Israeli Archaeologists Unearth 3,400-Year-Old Egyptian Artifacts in Cave

Apr 14, 2015 by News Staff

Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have found a large number of Egyptian artifacts and pottery vessels dating back to the Late...

Cassini Helps Solve Saturn’s Mysterious Great White Spots

Apr 14, 2015 by News Staff

Planetary researchers studying data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have found the solution to the mystery of why Saturn seethes with massive storms every...

The pictures on the left indicate the positions of the Rosetta Plasma Consortium fluxgate magnetometer (RPC-MAG) on the orbiter and of the Rosetta Lander Magnetometer and Plasma Monitor (ROMAP) on the lander. The graph on the right shows the data collected by the instruments. The data shown cover the period immediately prior to the second touchdown of Philae on November 12, 2014. Image credit: ESA / Auster et al / ATG medialab.

Nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is Non-Magnetic, Scientists Say

Apr 14, 2015 by News Staff

Complementary data collected by the Rosetta Plasma Consortium fluxgate magnetometer (RPC-MAG) on board ESA’s Rosetta orbiter, and by the Rosetta Lander...

The moons of our Solar System are brimming with unusual landscapes. However, sometimes they look a little more familiar, as in this new radar image from the Cassini orbiter. The image shows dark streaks carved into dunes reminiscent of those we might find on a beach on Earth, or raked with flowing lines in a Japanese Zen garden — but this scene is actually taking place on Saturn’s moon Titan. While our sand is composed of silicates, the ‘sand’ of these alien dunes is formed from grains of organic materials about the same size as particles of our beach sand. The small size and smoothness of these grains means that the flowing lines carved into the dunes show up as dark to the human eye. While previous images have spotted these eerily familiar patterns on Titan's dunes, this new image (colorized) shows them in greater detail. The image was obtained by Cassini's radar mapper on July 10, 2013. The vertical seam near the center is an artifact of radar image data processing. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Sci-News.com.

Why Dunes on Saturn’s Moon Titan Point to East

Apr 14, 2015 by News Staff

A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience explains why the sand dunes of Titan run in parallel lines from the west to the east. The moons...

This map shows the detailed distribution of dark matter across a large area of sky. The color scale represents projected mass density: red and yellow represent regions with more dense matter. Clusters of galaxies are represented by gray dots on the map - bigger dots represent larger clusters. The insets are images of two galaxy clusters and a cosmic void. Image credit: Dark Energy Survey.

Scientists Create Dark Matter Map

Apr 14, 2015 by News Staff

Researchers using data from the Dark Energy Camera (DEC) – an imaging device that is the primary instrument for the Dark Energy Survey – have...

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