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Comet C/2016 R2 (PanSTARRS). Image credit: Damian Peach, www.damianpeach.com / Jose J. Chambo, www.cometografia.es.

Astronomers Spot Rare Blue Comet: C/2016 R2

Oct 16, 2018 by Sergio Prostak

C/2016 R2 (PanSTARRS), a visitor from the Solar System’s distant Oort Cloud, sports a very complex tail dominated by blue light and is unusually rich...

Lavender Genome Sequenced

Oct 15, 2018 by Enrico de Lazaro

A team of scientists from Brock University and the University of British Columbia, Canada, has sequenced the genome of the English lavender (Lavandula...

The faint supernova iPTF14gqr appeared in the outskirts of IV Zw 155, a spiral galaxy located 920 million light years away from us. Image credit: SDSS / Caltech / Keck.

Ultra-Stripped Supernova Produces Neutron Star Binary

Oct 12, 2018 by News Staff

A team of astronomers led by Caltech’s Kishalay De has discovered the first recorded ‘ultra-stripped’ supernova — a faint type of supernova...

An artist’s impression of CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope detecting a fast radio burst. Image credit: Swinburne University of Technology / OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence.

Astronomers Discover Twenty New Fast Radio Bursts

Oct 11, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) at the Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory have nearly doubled the known...

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

New Science Results from Cassini’s Grand Finale

Oct 11, 2018 by News Staff

Cassini’s 20-year mission culminated in a series of wild orbits. First, it grazed the outer rim of Saturn’s rings and then, in the Grand Finale phase,...

Extra DNA Produces Blue Eyes in Huskies

Oct 10, 2018 by News Staff

In a study examining the DNA of over 6,000 dogs, researchers at Embark Veterinary, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts, have identified that duplication of a part...

Life appearance of the fossil flying squirrel Miopetaurista neogrivensis showing the animal ready to land on a tree branch. Image credit: Oscar Sanisidro / ICP.

World’s Oldest Flying Squirrel Fossil Discovered

Oct 10, 2018 by News Staff

An international team of paleontologists has found the world’s oldest flying squirrel fossil — an 11.63-million-year-old specimen of an extinct...

CK Vulpeculae resides in the constellation Vulpecula. It is just below the star Albireo, the head of Cygnus, the swan. That location is inside the Summer Triangle of bright stars, which is now high in the south after nightfall. The star is approximately 2,200 light-years from Earth. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Eyres et al.

ALMA Discovers New Type of Stellar Collision

Oct 10, 2018 by News Staff

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers found evidence that a white dwarf and a brown dwarf collided in a ‘blaze of...

Terrestrial penitentes from the southern end of the Chajnantor plain, Chile, in 2005; the view is broadly northwards; blades can be seen perpendicular to the viewing direction. Image credit: ESO.

50-Foot-Tall Ice Spikes Cover Europa, New Study Suggests

Oct 9, 2018 by News Staff

Fields of sharp ice growing to almost 50 feet (15 m) tall could be scattered across the equatorial regions of Jupiter’s moon Europa, according to a new...

Newborn giraffes with large and irregularly shaped spots survive better during their first few months of life. Image credit: Derek Lee, Wild Nature Institute / Pennsylvania State University.

Study: Giraffe Calves Inherit Spot Patterns from Mothers

Oct 8, 2018 by News Staff

According to a new study, published in the journal PeerJ, some features of a giraffe’s spot pattern are passed on from mother to baby. Newborn giraffes...

This image shows the position of NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, relative to the heliosphere. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

NASA’s Voyager 2 Probe About to Leave Solar System

Oct 8, 2018 by News Staff

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has detected an increase in cosmic rays that originate outside the Solar System. Currently, the probe is approximately 11...

This image of 2015 TG387 was taken by the Subaru Telescope on October 13, 2015. Image credit: Dave Tholen / Chad Trujillo / Scott Sheppard.

Astronomers Find New Extreme Dwarf Planet: 2015 TG387

Oct 5, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers have discovered a new dwarf planet in the Oort Cloud, a spherical ‘cloud’ of frozen objects surrounding the Solar System and extending...

An artist’s impression of the gas giant Kepler 1625b with its large moon, Kepler 1625b-i; the pair has a similar mass and radius ratio to the Earth-Moon system but scaled up by a factor of 11. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Kepler 1625b Has Neptune-Sized Moon, Astronomers Say

Oct 4, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope have assembled compelling evidence for the existence of a large...

The positions and reconstructed orbits of 20 high-velocity stars, represented on top of an artistic view of the Milky Way Galaxy. The seven stars shown in red are sprinting away from the Galaxy and could be traveling fast enough to eventually escape its gravity. Surprisingly, the study revealed also thirteen stars, shown in orange, that are racing towards the Milky Way: these could be stars from another galaxy, zooming right through our own. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Marchetti et al.

ESA’s Gaia Satellite Spots High-Velocity Stars Flying between Galaxies

Oct 4, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using data from ESA’s star mapping Gaia mission to look for hypervelocity stars being kicked out of our Milky Way Galaxy were surprised to...

The exquisite sensitivity of the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope allowed for direct observations of dim clouds of hydrogen glowing with Lyman-alpha emission in the early Universe. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / ESO / Lutz Wisotzki et al.

Early Universe is Glowing with Lyman-alpha Emission

Oct 3, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered an unexpected abundance of Lyman-alpha...

An artist’s impression of the super-Earth K2-265b. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

K2-265b: Hot, Rocky Super-Earth Found Circling Sun-Like Star

Oct 2, 2018 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers have discovered a ‘super-Earth’ exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star 473 light-years from Earth. An artist’s impression of the super-Earth...

CERN Physicists Discover Two New Particles

Oct 1, 2018 by News Staff

Physicists from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment have found two never-before-seen particles, as well as hints of another new particle,...

An artist’s reconstruction of Ledumahadi mafube foraging in the Early Jurassic of South Africa; in the foreground, Heterodontosaurus. Image credit: Viktor Radermacher, University of the Witwatersrand.

New Jurassic Sauropodomorph Dinosaur Unveiled

Oct 1, 2018 by News Staff

Paleontologists have discovered what they say is a completely unexpected new sauropodomorph dinosaur that lived 200 million years ago (Jurassic period)...

The blue-throated hillstar (Oreotrochilus cyanolaemus), male. Image credit: Sornoza-Molina et al, doi: 10.1642/AUK-18-58.1.

New Hummingbird Species Discovered in Ecuador

Sep 28, 2018 by News Staff

A new species of hummingbird, called the blue-throated hillstar (Oreotrochilus cyanolaemus), has been discovered in the southwestern Andes of Ecuador by...