Astronomers Find that Black Holes "Seesaw" Between Ejecting Material as Winds or Jets

Astronomers at the University of Warwick have discovered that black holes don’t just consume matter—they manage it, choosing whether to blast it into space as high-speed jets or sweep it away in vast winds.

Toxic Hydrogen Cyanide And Its Role In The Origins Of Life

Hydrogen Cyanide, which is toxic, may have played an important role in the emergence of life. Its unique properties, especially in frigid environments in space, may have helped generate the complex molecules necessary for life to appear.

Deep Magma Oceans Could Help Make Super-Earths Habitable

Deep beneath the surface of distant exoplanets known as super-Earths, oceans of molten rock may be doing something extraordinary: powering magnetic fields strong enough to shield entire planets from dangerous cosmic radiation and other harmful high-energy particles.

Could Bees Be a Model for SETI Searches?

Humans have always been fascinated with space. We frequently question whether we are alone in the universe. If not, what does intelligent life look like? And how would aliens communicate?

Searching for 'Green Oceans' and 'Purple Earths'

The early stage of giant telescope development involves a lot of horse-trading to try to appease all the different stakeholders that are hoping to get what they want out of the project, but also to try to appease the financial managers that want to minimize its cost. Typically this horse-trading takes the form of a series of white papers that describe what would be needed to meet the stated objectives of the mission and suggest the type of instrumentation and systems that would be needed to achieve them. One such white paper was recently released by the Living Worlds Working Group, which is tasked with speccing out the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), one of the world’s premiere exoplanet hunting telescopes that is currently in the early development stage. Their argument in the paper, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that, in order to meet the objectives laid out in the recent Decadal survey that called for the telescope, it must have extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, but also be able to capture a very wide spectrum of light.

The Universe's Most Common Water is a Hot Mess

Inside the cores of ice giant planets, the pressure and temperature are so extreme that the water residing there transitions into a phase completely unfamiliar under the normal conditions of Earth. Known as “superionic water”, this form of water is a type of ice. However, unlike regular ice it’s actually hot, and also black. For decades, scientists thought that the superionic water in the core of Neptune and Uranus is responsible for the wild, unaligned magnetic fields that the Voyager 2 spacecraft saw when passing them. A series of experiments described in a paper published in Nature Communications by Leon Andriambariarijaona and his co-authors at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Sorbonne provides experimental evidence of why exactly the ice causes these weird magnetic fields - because it is far messier than anyone expected.

A New Census of Dwarf Galaxies Shows More Massive Black Holes than Previously Thought

A new census of more than 8,000 galaxies finds active black holes rising in frequency with galaxy mass, jumping sharply in galaxies similar in mass to the Milky Way.