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Feast your eyes, my good curious friends, on this — by far the clearest image ever taken of a very young star and its newly formed protoplanetary disk. In this spectacular image you can see the young star HL Tau, which is just about one million years old. This image is truly a marvel of science. Around this star, dust and gas swirl, slowly developing into planets and asteroids. You may or may not believe it but a few billion years ago, this is precisely what our very own Solar System would’ve looked like. This amazing image was taken by ALMA. ALMA stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. It is a huge telescope consisting of 66 separate antennas, situated high up in the Atacama Desert in northern parts of Chile. ALMA is operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). According to ESO this image comes from some of the telescopes first observations in its “new and most powerful mode”. ALMA has been under construction for years, but only a few year ago, they h...

A team led by NASA has found evidence of an enigmatic planet whose properties are so peculiar and unusual, that it brings into question everything astronomers know about these types of planets. Planet WASP-18b is approximately 325 light years away from Earth and its mass is approximately 10 times greater than that of Jupiter.  Around it is a smothering atmosphere of carbon monoxide, and the planet is almost entirely devoid of any traces of water and has extremely high temperatures. Obviously, all of this makes life incredibly unimaginable on this planet. What is particularly interesting about this planet is that having an upper atmosphere filled with carbon monoxide is pretty unheard of in the universe so far. Kyle Sheppard of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who is also lead author of the paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters said the following about the discovery: “the composition of WASP-18b defies all expectations. We don't know of any other extrasolar plane...

Jupiter, the enormous gas giant is known to have breathtaking patterns across its surface, with images proving its beauty true. Now, new photographs courtesy of NASA’s Juno spacecraft. No, your eyes are not fooling you that is in fact an image of the gas giant’s surface, not an abstract painting created by the hand of an artist. Breathtaking screenshot of Jupiter's atmosphere from short movie "Wanderers" This image was processed by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstadt, and Sean Doran who enhanced the image’s best aspects and despite all of this, the swirls remain fully original.   NASA captures stunning image of Jupiter and its clouds NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/ Seán Doran) Jupiter is unique and nothing on Earth compares to the complexity, ferocity, and beauty of Jupiter’s storms which intertwine with each other within the planet’s atmosphere which forms Jupiter’s infamous storms. The images presented here were taken from a distance of just 11,747 miles (...

Imagine this: you are on a space exploration adventure and nothing could be better. Your diet is fantastic, consisting of all the astronauts typically eat and your eyes are the witnesses to beautiful celestial wonders. You look back towards our tiny, blue marble of a planet and you remember that in just a few hours, you are returning from your exotic travels.  Everything is normal, all works, nothing to fear about. However, so you thought. Right before going back down to Earth, someone accidentally opened the airlock and you found yourself floating in the vacuum of space completely unprotected, and devoid of oxygen. Panic immediately sets in because you know just how horrific it is to be stranded in such a vacuum. Being in the black void of the heavens just as you are poses a danger like no other that will definitely be the cause of your death. Even if after a few moments you found your way back to safety once more, there is no possible way reverse a substantial amount of damage y...

At times, scientists observe flashes of radio bursts with astounding levels of energy, which are called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB’S). Such a flash was observed in 2001, a brilliant burst of light breaching the skies was observed. This event was so powerful that in the matter of seconds, power was released that was equivalent to that of 500 million suns. Just as fast as it had come, the signal disappeared in the matter of milliseconds.  Ever since such an occurrence in 2001, approximately 30 of such flashes have been identified. However, new estimates indicate that these flashes occur almost every second. Dr.Avi Loeb, science professor of Harvard University, says that “in the time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee, hundreds of FRB’s may have gone off somewhere in the universe.”  The origins these flashes remain unknown but an explanation may have been found. The FRB 121102 is the only one of such flashes that repeats. In fact, scientists have observed at least 150 flashes fro...

The University of Texas’ research team has discovered that the formation of the moon’s crust composed by one mineral could not be explained by the initial crust formation and must have been a result of a major secondary event. The Moon experienced quite the rough beginning. There are few theories about its creation. Although it’s still debated, it is believed by most scientists that the moon was formed by a chunk of the Earth that had been hacked off during a planetary collision and spent most of its early years with its surface covered by an ocean of molten magma before cooling and forming the lunar surface we know today. Nick Dygert, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was temporarily involved in the research said the following about the discovery: “it’s fascinating to me that there could be a body as big as the Moon that was completely molten.” The University of Texas lead a research team at the Austin Jackson School of Geosciences that created a mag...

It has been asked frequently-- how come only the past is present in our memories and not the future? Why time travel is not an actuality and the process of aging is irreversible? Why is entropy a definitive constant? What came before the Big Bang? Was time existent before the Big Bang?  The answers to these complex questions can be potentially traced to the moment of the Big Bang. Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist of California Institute of Technology whose research focuses on theoretical physics, astrophysics and issues in cosmology, gravitation and field theory addresses this question below. Time definitively infuses our lives for it is constantly measured. It’s tracked, put to use, machines employ time and others are built to keep track of its passage and measure it just as a ruler measures distances. There is a stark difference between the ruler and the clock-- time doesn’t necessarily employ distances but it does take use of direction pointing past from future. Sean Carroll’...

Aliens-- always a prevalent topic of discussion and one sparking controversy. It is known to everyone that scientists have been searching for extraterrestrial planets for signs of life. Now, in the hope of making contact with aliens, a message beamed by scientists towards two planets potentially capable of supporting life. The message was directed towards GJ 273-- known as Luyten’s star, a red dwarf, lying 12.36 light years away from Earth but scientists estimate that it will take a mere 12 years to reach it. If any aliens reside on the planets and the message is received and understood by them, and a reply is sent, then it is expected to be received in the duration of the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice in 2042 (June 21st, 2042). However, the plan set in motion does not please all-- Stephen Hawking, amongst other experts, warns us that if aliens were ever to discover life on Earth, it is very probable that such a discovery could be the end of a civilization. Life on Earth would...

An ancient natural nuclear reactor that was churning away nearly 2 billion years ago sounds like a made-up myth. Perhaps it's because the word reactor suggests a manmade structure. Instead, the reactor is an area of natural uranium inside the Earth's crust, detected in Okla, Gabon. Uranium is naturally radioactive, and the settings in this rocky area happened to be just accurate to do some nuclear reactions.  The natural reactor must have annoyed nuclear scientists: The first nuclear reactor to provide electricity was build up in 1951, and this only made a small amount of energy. The pile of rock in the ground in Okla, instead, had generated nuclear power around 2 billion years ago! Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors It was discovered in  1972 , when some French scientists took uranium ore from the mine in Gabon to test its uranium content. Typically, uranium ore is made up of three types (isotopes) of uranium, each one with a different number of neutrons: U...

On our planet, we’re quite in luck if we see a few hundred meteors an hour during a meteor shower. But if you were on Mars about three years ago, nevertheless, you would have witnessed something extraordinary – 108,000 meteors per hour, the biggest meteor shower ever in recorded history on any planet. This meteor shower was a result of Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) zipping past the planet on October 19, 2014. We were lucky to have a spacecraft in circling the planet back then, and what they observed was unbelievable.  Observations from the event were offered few days ago at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2017 in Riga, Latvia. Dr Beatriz Sanchez-Cano from the University of Leicester, who co-presented the findings, said “This is one of the most exciting planetary events that we’ll see in our lifetime. Mars was literally engulfed by the coma, the comet’s outer atmosphere, for several hours.” Siding Spring flew past Mars at a distance of 140,000 kilometers (87,000 mi...

Japanese company Obayashi has declared that they will have a space elevator assembled by 2050. The elevator will spread 96,000 km (60,000 mi) into space and will transport people and shipment to a new space station. It will also work as a port to transport astronauts to Mars and beyond. “The construction process consists of deploying the cable and constructing the facilities. It is necessary to analyze the cable dynamics in order to estimate the characteristics of the cable, counter-weight, facilities and climbers, and in order to determine the construction procedures. Parameters for the cable dynamics include tension, displacement and elongation of the cable due to ascending climbers, masses of counter-weight and cable, wind, and fixed loads of facilities. With the help of a computer simulation of the equations of motion, we designed the system and determined the construction process.” ~ Obayashi Watch the video below to learn more about their model.

Accelerating expansion may not be real but instead be an apparent effect, according to new research published in the journal of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . A new study by a group of researchers at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, found the fit of Type Ia supernovae to a model of a universe devoid of all dark energy to be a better fit than to the model containing dark energy.   Dark energy, proposed in 1998, has been assumed to form an approximate 70% of the present material content of our Universe. This nebulous quantity is a popular, well known component of unknown physics. Current models of the Universe require dark energy to explain the observed rate of acceleration in the expansion of our Universe. Such measures are based off of measurements in the distance of supernova explosions in distant galaxies that appear to be farther apart than they should be if the acceleration of expansion were not taking place. This brings a question...