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The Properties of Expanding Universes, Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis, has been published online for the first time and is free to read. However, the thesis, submitted in 1966, may not be a stroll in the park for most. This was Hawking's second degree, after his first-class bachelors degree in physics at Oxford. It can now be downloaded from the University of Cambridge's open access repository, Apollo. Penned as a 24-year-old Cambridge postgraduate student, Hawking explores "some implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe" in the academic work. He rules out that galaxies could form through the growth of initially small perturbations. After he was awarded his PhD, Hawking became a research fellow at Cambridge, and then later became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 to 2009. He became widely known following his scientific books aimed at a general audience. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time has remained the most popular book on the Sun...

Just last year , researchers observed 2016 HO3, a satellite of our planet. And now new and more comprehensive observations, displayed at the Annual Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting, have now verified that the object is certainly a piece of rock with unknown origin but certainly not a bit of space junk. The orbit of 2016 HO3, around the Earth and the Sun. NASA/JPL-Caltech The path of 2016 HO3 is strange, to say the least. It circles the Sun, and also orbits our Earth, moving between 38 and 100 times the distance between our planet and the Moon. So it’s quiet close enough to make its origin complex but a bit too far to be studied in detail. To understand 2016 HO3, Assistant Professor Vishnu Reddy and his team from the University of Arizona decided to perform some ad hoc observations during a close approach. The team wasn’t able to constrain its size – which is definitely no larger than 100 meters (330 feet) – but could tell that it rotates on its axis twice in an hour and reflects...

Astronomers have just observed what seems to be the brightest nova ever seen in one of our closest neighbor galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud. Novae are major astronomical events which mostly happen when dying stars intensely erupt back into life for a few weeks or months. This discovery is being considered as one of the most major discoveries of 2017. When astronomers first observed these events in the 16th century, they mistook them for the new stars, hence the Latin name – nova. Novae are fuelled by the interaction between old white dwarf and Sun-like companion stars. Material is transferred from the companion to the white dwarf star, gradually accumulating until it reaches a critical pressure, causing a sudden and huge increase in brightness. An international team of astronomers used telescopes in South Africa, Australia and South America to reveal that the nova SMCN 2016-10a, which was spotted on 14 October 2016, is one of the most luminous novae ever seen in any galaxy. The ob...

According to a publication from the ESO , researchers working at the observatory located in Chile have observed an astronomical event that has never been seen before. The particulars of this finding will be unconfined next week 16 October 2017 at 16:00 CEST, at a press conference at ESO Headquarters in Garching, Germany. The particular event will be presented by ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile by the Director General, Xavier Barcons, and will hold several talks by representatives of numerous research groups around Europe. The last time that astronomers exposed a revolutionary finding of this nature was when NASA researchers witnessed the plumes on Enceladus and Europa as well as the grand announcement that LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) discovered gravitational waves from two black holes in a process of being merged, ushering in a new era in astronomy, letting us to see the "dark" universe as never before. The ESO image at the top of the pag...

Just 2 years, CERN unconfined the data from its impressive Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments onto an online accessible portal called the Open Data portal. It was an extraordinary action, letting those who don't have access to a particle accelerator use data from the LHC's experiments. It's not totally up-to-date. There's a three-year restriction on results, so, normally speaking, the most recent data uploaded on this online portal is from the year 2014. This was the first time outcomes of any particle collider experiment have been made accessible to the public, and now it has led to another discovery. About a week ago, a group of researchers from MIT published an article in Physical Review Letters that used data from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), to clarify a feature within high-energy particle collisions. Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is one of the LHC's main detectors. When protons hit at very high speeds, they discharge jets of quarks and gluons. The MIT ...

If you’ve ever had a chance to camp out to witness the northern lights, you know they can be mysterious and amazing. They’re only observable on dark, clear nights up north when a solar flare or solar wind fires particles toward Earth. Witnessing this phenomenon live requires a bit of luck, but if watchers wish to boost their chances, now's the best time.  As  Thrillist reports , the northern lights are at their peak—and won’t be this bright again until 2025. The colorful lights that appear to bend in the sky over the Arctic Circle are the creation of electrons from the Sun crashing with gases in the planet’s atmosphere. The lights are controlled by the Sun, and as solar activity goes through 11-year cycles, so does the aurora borealis. The Sun is presently at the end of the extreme stage of its cycle. The amplified solar activity makes for northern lights that are more regular and observable farther south. As the Sun starts to move into its least stage of activity, the light s...

There are sections in Pluto where enormous ice structures occur. Researchers finally consider they know how they are made. Researchers have cracked one of Pluto's most puzzling mysteries. In 2105, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto. What it witness near Pluto's equator has puzzled researchers ever since: Huge spikes of methane ice that stand as high as a NYC skyscraper. "We asked ourselves why it forms all of those ridges as opposed to just being big blobs of ice on the ground." -Jeffrey Moore, NASA Ames Research Center The answer discloses that Pluto's weather is more active than previously thought. Minor types of these icy forests exist on Earth. The structures are called penitentes. They form near Earth's equator on top of tall mountains. Up there, circumstances are right to turn snow straight to water vapor. This procedure — called sublimation — generates hard, sharp spikes of snow. NASA researchers believe the similar procedure happens on Pl...