Dying star illuminates distant galaxy, lifting veil of interstellar darkness for astronomers
The dying star, which lit the galactic scene, is the most distant stellar explosion of its kind ever studied.
Science Spotlight
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Planetary system orbiting two suns discovered by astronomers
The discovery of the first transiting circumbinary multi-planet system: two planets orbiting around a pair of stars, is announced by astronomers.
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Mississippi State borrows grasshopper collection from Smithsonian
JoVonn Hill, a research associate with the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station at Mississippi State University, recently borrowed 32,000 grasshoppers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History for study. Many of the specimens...
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Fossil pollen used to augment climate record of Egypt’s Nile Delta
Ancient pollen and charcoal preserved in deeply buried sediments in Egypt’s Nile Delta document the region’s ancient droughts and fires, including a huge drought 4,200 years ago associated with the demise of Egypt’s Old Kingdom.
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Recreating a slice of the universe
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years.
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Largest ever 3D map of the sky released by astronomers
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has released the largest three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes ever created.
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A bubbling cauldron of star birth
A bubbling cauldron of star birth is highlighted in this new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope of the Cygnus-X star-forming region some 4,600 light-years from Earth. It contains 10 times as much gas as...
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Female spiders produce mating plugs to prevent unwanted sex from males
They observed that no plugs were ever formed during mating trials, but instead, females exposed to many males produced the amorphous plugs during the egg-laying process.
