Science

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Sulphur dioxide concentrations drop over India during COVID-19

Concentrations of sulphur dioxide in polluted areas in India have decreased by around 40% between April 2019 and April 2020. Using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, from the European Union Copernicus programme, scientists have produced new maps which show the drop in concentrations across the country in times of COVID-19.

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TESS mission discovers massive ice giant

Neptune-sized planet may be remnant core of a much larger planet.

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In our solar system, the “ice giants” Neptune and Uranus are far less dense than rocky Venus and Earth. But astrophysicists on NASA’s TESS mission have now found an exoplanet, TOI-849b, that appears to be 40 times more massive than Earth, yet just as dense. This illustration depicts the exoplanet, UCF-1.01. Like TOI-849b, this exoplanet also orbits close to a star and is like “hot Neptune."

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Radar Points to Moon Being More Metallic Than Researchers Thought

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This image based on data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft shows the face of the Moon we see from Earth. The more we learn about our nearest neighbor, the more we begin to understand the Moon as a dynamic place with useful resources that could one day even support human presence.

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NASA Spacecraft Helps Identify Solar Radiation Patterns That Expose the Moon

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NASA’s TESS Delivers New Insights Into an Ultrahot World

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This illustration shows how planet KELT-9 b sees its host star. Over the course of a single orbit, the planet twice experiences cycles of heating and cooling caused by the star’s unusual pattern of surface temperatures. Between the star’s hot poles and cool equator, temperatures vary by about 1,500 F (800 C). This produces a “summer” when the planet faces a pole and a “winter” when it faces the cooler midsection. So every 36 hours, KELT-9 b experiences two summers and two winters.

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Hungriest of Black Holes Among the Most Massive in the Universe

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Hungriest of Black Holes Among the Most Massive in the Universe

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A Cosmic Mystery: ESO Telescope Captures the Disappearance of a Massive Star

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A Cosmic Mystery: ESO Telescope Captures the Disappearance of a Massive Star

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The Beautiful Mess in Galaxy Cluster Abell 2255

The beautiful mess in Abell 2255 An international team of astrophysicists led by Andrea Botteon from Leiden University, the Netherlands, has shed light on one of the most intricate objects of the radio sky: the galaxy cluster Abell 2255. Thanks to the incredible detailed images obtained with the European radio telescope LOFAR, the scientists have been able to observe details never seen before of the emission from the cluster. The halo in Abell 2255 is not smooth, but contains numerous filaments that have not been seen previously. The result has been presented today at the virtual annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS) and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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The filamentary structures observed by LOFAR at the center of Abell 2255, here reported in red. These radio emissions are due to trails of particles and magnetic fields released by the galaxies during their motion inside the cluster

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Array of Radio Telescopes Reveals Explosion on the Surface of a Hot Dead Star

An international group of researchers observed a source of variable gamma rays identified in 2010 by the NASA satellite Fermi. They used a technique called VLBI, that combines data from several radio telescopes on Earth, to produce the sharpest images to date. Surprisingly, the source of gamma rays was a symbiotic nova, a peculiar stellar system known to astronomers as V407 Cyg. The result, with first author Marcello Giroletti (National Institute of Astrophysics INAF, Italy), has been presented at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS), and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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The set of images obtained from the observations, starting 20 days after the discovery of the nova event and tracing the advance of the shock front for over six months.

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One galaxy, two asteroids

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One galaxy, two asteroids