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Another One Bites the Dust

Hunting out water on the Moon

Close-up of the Sombrero Galaxy, M104 from the Hubble Space Telescope.

LIGO has discovered another likely binary neutron star merger — and this one has new, interesting implications.

The Sun is Earth’s primary power source. Energy from the Sun, called solar irradiance, drives Earth’s climate, temperature, weather, atmospheric chemistry, ocean cycles, energy balance and more.

Iron in the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere.

Two examples of aligned and misaligned protoplanetary disks around binary stars (circumbinary disks), observed with ALMA. Binary star orbits are added for clarity. Left: in star system HD 98800 B, the disk is misaligned with inner binary stars. The stars are orbiting each other (in this view, towards and away from us) in 315 days. Right: in star system AK Sco, the disk is in line with the orbit of its binary stars. The stars are orbiting each other in 13.6 days.

X-ray Images of Perseus Cluster
Astronomers used Chandra to look for extraordinarily low-mass "axion-like" particles in the Perseus galaxy cluster. A Chandra observation lasting over five days of the central supermassive black hole in the center of the cluster showed no evidence for certain axion-like particles, which some theorists think can explain dark matter. The lack of a detection in these Chandra observations helps rule out some versions of string theory, a set of models intended to tie together all known forces, interactions, and particles.