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Another deluge of curio mounts as the astronomer, Dustin Lang from the University of Toronto, tweeted about a baffling X-shaped bulge, comprising stars and interstellar matter, lying at the heart of Milky Way’s flat structure. Further analysis of this massive structure can lend a fair insight of how the galaxy was formed, scientists envision.  “The bulge is a key signature of formation of the Milky Way. If we understand the bulge, we will understand the key processes that have formed and shaped our galaxy” says Melissa Ness, who is a postdoctoral researcher from the Max Planck institute for Astronomy, Germany. Milky Way. NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech) “The X-shaped morphology of the bulge in itself and the fraction of bulge stars that comprise orbits within this structure has important implications for the formation history of the Milky Way, and spiral galaxies in general” published by Ness and Lang , who are expected to team up as a proper and detailed research starts ...

As our current video games become more and more lifelike and realistic, it's becoming clear that at some point, perhaps soon, our simulations will be indistinguishable from reality. If that's true, how do we know it didn't already happen? Could we be in a simulation now? A simulation created by someone? Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is just a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said. He noted the obvious  gap between human and chimpanzee intelligence, despite that the fact that we share more than 98 percent of our DNA. Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. “We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” This is rea...

Yes you heard it right. Physicists have just made what they say is the first ever device that's completely capable of producing particles that act as if they have negative mass. This particular device produces a peculiar particle that's half-light/half-matter, and as if that doesn’t sound cool enough, it might also be the foundation for a completely new kind of laser that could function on far less energy than present technologies. This forms on new theoretical work on the behavior of something called a polariton, which seems to act as if it has negative mass – a mind-bending property that perceives objects move towards the force pushing it, instead of being pushed away. Now physicists from the University of Rochester have created a device that allows them to actually create these polaritons at room temperature. They do this by manipulating captured photons and combine them with a kind of quasi-particle called an exciton to make something half-light/half-matter that some scien...

Cosmos” is returning to the National Geographic Channel and Fox . The networks have ordered a second season of the science documentary television series, which is a follow-up to the 1980s series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” with Carl Sagan. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and host of the Emmy Award-nominated “Star Talk,” returns as host of the series, scheduled to premiere globally in Spring 2019. The announcement was made at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Saturday. The series hails from executive producer, writer, and director Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and one of the writers on the original 1980s series. She and Steven Soter, another writer from the original show, won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming in 2014 for the show’s first season. Seth MacFarlane, Brannon Braga, and Jason Clark also serve as executive producers. It will be produced by Cosmos Studios, the Ithaca, NY-based company Druyan co-founded in 2000, and Fuzzy Door...

You can call it whatever—a purple moon, a blue red moon or a blood moon—but on 31 st Jan, the moon will be a special and you don’t want to miss. Three distinct astronomic events will happen concurrently that night, resulting in what some are referring it as a super blue blood moon eclipse .  This particular astronomical rarity hasn't occurred for more than 150 years. A super moon, like the one observable on New Year's Day, is the term for when a full moon is closest to the Earth in its orbit, appearing bigger and brighter than normal. On Jan. 31, the moon will be full for the second time in a month, a rare occasion—it happens once every two and a half years—known as a blue moon. To top it off, there will also be a total lunar eclipse. But unlike last year's solar eclipse, this sky-watching event isn't going to be as visible in the continental United States. The best views of the middle-of-the-night eclipse will be in central and eastern Asia, Indonesia, New Zeal...

Microgravity environments do strange and often undesirable things to the human body, such as weakening muscles and bones, shrinking hearts, and flattening eyeballs. But it’s also known to make astronauts a bit taller, as Norishige Kanai is now learning. The Japanese astronaut arrived at the ISS just three weeks ago.  In just three weeks he’s already grown an astonishing 3.5 inches (9 cm)—and he’s now really worried that he won’t fit into the seat of the Russian Soyuz return vehicle. This may seem like nothing but it is a serious problem and may have some serious consequences. “Good morning, good morning,” tweeted Kanai earlier today from the International Space Station. “Today there is a serious report... I had physical measurements since I got to space... [with] heights up to 9 centimeters! I grew like some plant in just three weeks, nothing like this since I was a junior high school student. I am a bit worried whether my body will fit in the return Soyuz seat.” Along with astron...