Science | WPN World People News

Artist’s impression of the multiplanetary system of newly discovered super-Earths orbiting nearby red dwarf Gliese 887

This animated gif is an artist's concept of the planet AU Mic b and its young parent star. The faint band of light encircling the pair is a disk of gas and dust from which both the star and the planet formed.

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Illustration of the Spektr-RG spacecraft.

By using a new measuring method – the so-called X-ray Thomson scattering – an international team of researchers was able to prove that the high pressure inside planets like Neptune or Uranus dissolves hydrocarbons into its individual parts and converts the released carbon atoms into diamond structures. Thanks to the new measuring method, such conditions, which experts call warm, dense matter and which do not occur naturally on Earth, can be examined more closely.

Six circumstellar disks selected from the larger sample of 26 disks obtained with the Gemini South telescope in Chile using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). These images highlight the diversity of shapes and sizes that these disks can take and show the outer reaches of star systems in their formative years.

In August of 2019, the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave network witnessed the merger of a black hole with 23 times the mass of our sun and a mystery object 2.6 times the mass of the sun. Scientists do not know if the mystery object was a neutron star or black hole, but either way it set a record as being either the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole.

To ensure the best coverage of our solar system, MIT Assistant Professor Richard Linares envisions a constellation of "statites" that communicate and work together, only activating the statite in the optimum position to fly by or rendezvous with an interstellar object successfully. Other statites in the constellation can continue to wait for the next ISO to appear.

A model showing the 101 electrons orbiting the element mendelevium.

Sometimes, when something is broken, the first step to fixing it is to break it even more.

This animation shows a type of gas giant planet known as a hot Jupiter that orbits very close to its star. Finding more of these youthful planets could help astronomers understand how they formed and if they migrate from cooler climes during their lifetimes.