For the first time, astronomers have spotted enormous, galaxy-scale shock waves rattling the “cosmic web” that connects nearly all known galaxies. These cosmic waves could reveal clues about how the largest objects in the universe were sculpted. The discovery was made by stitching and stacking thousands of radio telescope images together, which revealed the soft … Read more
The Vikings explored, raided and traded across a vast area stretching from North America to the Middle East between roughly the late eighth and mid-11th centuries. In Old Norse, the language the Vikings spoke, “a Viking was a sea-borne raider, and to go-a-viking was to undertake sea-borne raiding,” Angus Somerville and Russell Andrew McDonald, both … Read more
The largest animal ever to walk on Earth was likely the dinosaur Argentinosaurus, a hulking 77-ton (70 metric tons) titanosaur that lived about 90 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. For comparison, the heaviest animal on land today is the African elephant (Loxodonta), which weighs less than 7 tons (6 metric tons). And both … Read more
A sea creature mentioned in 13th-century Old Norse manuscripts, which historians thought was a kraken-like mythological monster, is actually a whale using a hunting strategy known as trap or tread-water feeding, a new study finds. Scientists only described this feeding behavior around a decade ago, after they spotted humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and Bryde’s whales … Read more
The asteroid Ryugu, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars, contains many of the building blocks for life, a new analysis finds. The study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Science, is one of the first peeks at the samples from Ryugu brought back by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2020. The mission is only … Read more
Researchers have finally pinpointed the likely origin of mysterious heartbeat-like signals spat out by the sun during solar flares. The findings could help us learn more about how potentially damaging solar storms are unleashed, a new study shows. Solar radio bursts are streams of electromagnetic radiation — made up mainly of radio waves, as well … Read more
If wormholes exist, they could magnify the light of distant objects by up to 100,000 times — and that could be the key to finding them, according to research published Jan. 19 in the journal Physical Review D. Wormholes are theoretical funnel-shaped portals through which matter (or perhaps spacecraft) could travel great distances. To imagine … Read more
The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found. Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant … Read more
Astronomers have spotted a runaway supermassive black hole, seemingly ejected from its home galaxy and racing through space with a chain of stars trailing in its wake. According to the team’s research, which was published April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (opens in new tab), the discovery offers the first observational evidence that supermassive … Read more
Telomeres are the “caps” that protect the ends of DNA strands from being destroyed by a cell. They are made up of areas of repeated DNA sequences combined with specific proteins at the ends of chromosomes — the tightly wound structures of DNA and proteins inside cells. Telomeres play a role in how fast cells … Read more
