Space and time from Science Daily Feed

A new climate modeling study presents a new scenario of how climate and life on our planet would change in response to a potential future strike of a medium-sized (~500 m) asteroid.

There's a 26 per cent annual chance that space rocket junk will re-enter the atmosphere and pass through a busy flight area, according to a recent study. While the chance of debris hitting an aircraft is very low, the research highlights that the potential for uncontrolled space rocket junk to disrupt flights and create additional costs for airlines and passengers is not.

The study of 'starquakes' (like earthquakes, but in stars) promises to give us important new insights into the properties of neutron stars, improving our understanding of the universe and advancing the way we live.

A research team presents an AI assessor for Hall-effect ion thrusters, the engines of satellites and space probes.

Physicists have performed a groundbreaking simulation they say sheds new light on an elusive phenomenon that could determine the ultimate fate of the Universe.

An international team of scientists have modelled formation and evolution of strongest magnetic fields in the Universe.

Using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, scientists have found a huge exoplanet and a brown dwarf. This is the first time a planet has been uniquely discovered by Gaia's ability to sense the gravitational tug or 'wobble' the planet induces on a star. Both the planet and brown dwarf are orbiting low-mass stars, a scenario thought to be extremely rare.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a cosmic bullseye! The gargantuan galaxy LEDA 1313424 is rippling with nine star-filled rings after an 'arrow' -- a far smaller blue dwarf galaxy -- shot through its heart. Astronomers using Hubble identified eight visible rings, more than previously detected by any telescope in any galaxy, and confirmed a ninth using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Previous observations of other galaxies show a maximum of two or three rings.

Scientist have concluded water did not arrive as early during Earth's formation as previously thought, an insight that bears directly on the question of when life originated on the planet. The finding is significant because the data reported by the study support the idea that water arrived towards the final stages of Earth's development into a planet from dust and gas, what geologists refer to as late accretion.

A team of scientists has made the first experimental measurements of laser-induced motions of miniature lightsails in the lab.

Researchers measured very precisely atomic masses of radioactive lanthanum isotopes and found an interesting feature in their nuclear binding energies. The discovery provides essential data for understanding how elements heavier than iron are produced in the Cosmos and triggers new research to elucidate the underlying nuclear structure causing this unexpected change in nuclear binding energies.

Researchers have demonstrated a new, unsupervised machine learning approach to find new patterns in the auxiliary channel data of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

New research has combined cosmological data from two major surveys of the universe's evolutionary history and found hints that it may be less clumpy at certain points than previously thought. Their findings suggest that the universe may have become more complex with advancing age.

Researchers found for the first time evidence that even microquasars containing a low-mass star are efficient particle accelerators, which leads to a significant impact on the interpretation of the abundance of gamma rays in the universe.

The universe is getting more disordered, entropy is growing -- this is the second law of thermodynamics. But according to quantum theory, entropy should actually stay the same. Scientists took a closer look and resolved this apparent contradiction.

Scientists detected all five nucleobases -- building blocks of DNA and RNA -- in samples returned from asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

Scientists found that asteroid Bennu contained a set of salty mineral deposits that formed in an exact sequence when a brine evaporated, leaving clues about the type of water that flowed billions of years ago.

Scientists developed advanced dating methods to track geological changes on the far side of the moon and found evidence of relatively recent activity.

As humankind imagines living off-planet -- on the moon, Mars and beyond -- the question of how to sustain life revolves around the physical necessities of oxygen, food and water. We know there is water on the moon, but how do we find it? Researchers may help bring science fiction to reality by providing a divining rod to guide future space missions.

Thirty years after the discovery of the first exoplanet, we detected more than 7000 of them in our Galaxy. But there are still billions more to be discovered! At the same time, exoplanetologists have begun to take an interest in their characteristics, with the aim of finding life elsewhere in the Universe. This is the background to the discovery of super-Earth HD 20794 d by an international team. The new planet lies in an eccentric orbit, so that it oscillates in and out of its star's habitable zone. This discovery is the fruit of 20 years of observations using the best telescopes in the world.