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ESA’s Gaia Mission Releases Data on More Than 1.8 Billion Stars

Data from more than 1.8 billion stars have been used to create this map of the entire sky. It shows the total brightness and color of stars observed by ESA’s Gaia satellite and released as part of Gaia’s Early Data Release 3. Brighter regions represent denser concentrations of bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer and fainter stars are observed. The color of the image is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky. The bright horizontal structure that dominates the image is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is actually a flattened disk seen edge-on that contains most of the Galaxy’s stars. In the middle of the image, the Galactic center appears bright, and thronged with stars. Darker regions across the Galactic plane correspond to foreground clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which absorb the light of more distant stars. Many of these clouds conceal stellar nurseries where new generations of stars are currently being born. Dotted across the image are also many globular and open clusters, as well as entire galaxies beyond our own. The two bright objects in the lower right of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO / A. Moitinho.
Dec 3, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers from the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium released today the most detailed ever catalogue of Milky Way stars. The new data set, called the Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3), contains detailed information — stellar positions, movement, brightness and colors — on more than 1.8 billion sources, detected by ESA’s Gaia satellite. This represents an increase of more than 100 million sources over the previous data release,...

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ASKAP conducted its first survey of the entire southern sky in record speed and detail, creating a new atlas of the Universe. Image credit: CSIRO.

ASKAP Radio Telescope Maps Nearly Three Million Galaxies

Dec 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) have mapped approximately 3,000,000 galaxies in the observable Universe. ASKAP...

Life reconstruction of the titanosaur from the Upper Cretaceous Adamantina Formation in São Paulo backcountry, southeastern Brazil. The animal was reconstructed based on associated saltasaurid specimens in the area. Image credit: Hugo Cafasso.

Cretaceous Titanosaur Suffered from Blood Parasites and Severe Bone Inflammation

Dec 1, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

A giant sauropod dinosaur that lived 85.2 million years ago (Cretaceous period) in what is now Brazil had an aggressive case of osteomyelitis in its leg...

Life reconstruction of Bagualia alba. Image credit: Jorge González.

Newly-Discovered Long-Necked Dinosaur Survived Early Jurassic Global Warming

Nov 30, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists in Argentina have identified a new species of eusauropod (true sauropod) dinosaur that lived 179 million years ago, just after the mysterious...

Falcatakely forsterae amidst non-avian dinosaurs and other animals from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Image credit: Mark Witton.

Cretaceous-Period Bird from Madagascar Had Sickle-Shaped Beak

Nov 27, 2020 by News Staff

Paleontologists in Madagascar have identified a new genus and species of enantiornithine bird that had a long and deep beak, a morphology that was previously...

Xu et al. present the first anatomical and histological evidence of tail repair with regrowth in an archosaur, the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis); the regrown alligator tails constituted approximately 6-18% of the total body length and were morphologically distinct from original tail segments. Image credit: Norbert Nagel / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Young American Alligators Can Regrow Their Tails, Study Shows

Nov 24, 2020 by News Staff

Young American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) have the ability to regrow their tails up to 18% of their total body length, according to a study...

This image from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper shows a superbolt-producing lightning flash over the southeastern United States on February 19, 2019. The lightning flash spanned several hundred kilometers and lasted nearly 7 seconds. Image credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Lightning ‘Superbolts’ Are Real, Two New Studies Confirm

Nov 24, 2020 by News Staff

‘Superbolts’ are distinct from typical lightning flashes and can be more than 1,000 times brighter, according to two new papers published in the Journal...

This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about 4 billion years ago. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.

Curiosity Finds Deposits from Megafloods in Martian Crater

Nov 23, 2020 by News Staff

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found a series of symmetrical, 10-m- (33-foot-) high gravel ridges — sedimentologic evidence of ancient giant floods...

An artist’s impression of Rajasaurus narmadensis, a cousin of the newly-discovered abelisaurid dinosaur Niebla antiqua. Image credit: Bogdanov / CC BY-SA 3.0.

New Carnivorous Dinosaur Unearthed in Patagonia

Nov 23, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

A new genus and species of medium-sized abelisaurid dinosaur has been unearthed in northern Patagonia, Argentina. An artist’s impression of Rajasaurus...

Ferromirum oukherbouchi reconstructed in association with invertebrates (orthocerid cephalopods and thylacocephalans) from the Devonian of Maider region, Morocco. Image credit: Frey et al., doi: 10.1038/s42003-020-01394-2.

Devonian-Period Shark Had Large Eyes and Unique Jaws

Nov 20, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists in Morocco have found fossil fragments from a previously undescribed genus and species of symmoriiform shark that lived during the Late...

The Blue Ring Nebula is located 6,197 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules. The nebula is 13 light years wide and is composed of hydrogen gas (blue) expanding from a central star, which is the remnant core of a stellar merger; red filaments are shockwave filaments from the merging event. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / M. Seibert, Carnegie Institution for Science / K. Hoadley, Caltech / GALEX Team.

Stellar Merger Produced Blue Ring Nebula Several Thousand Years Ago

Nov 19, 2020 by News Staff

In 2004, astronomers using NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer discovered an unusual, ring-shaped ‘blue’ nebula and the star at its center, TYC 2597-735-1....

The extinct Kiritimati sandpiper (Prosobonia cancellata), a close cousin of the newly-discovered Henderson sandpiper (Prosobonia sauli). Illustration by George Edward Lodge, 1907.

Researchers Discover Now Extinct Species of Polynesian Sandpiper

Nov 18, 2020 by News Staff

A new species of sandpiper has been identified from multiple Holocene fossil bones collected several decades ago on Henderson Island, an uninhabited island...

On May 24, 2020, four European radio telescopes detected two bright radio bursts from the SGR 1935+2154 magnetar. Image credit: Danielle Futselaar / Artsource.nl.

Fast Radio Burst from Galactic Magnetar SGR 1935+2154 is Repeating

Nov 18, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have detected two more millisecond-duration radio bursts from SGR 1935+2154, a magnetar located over 14,000 light-years away in the constellation...

CMS candidate event for a top quark and antitop quark producing an electron, a muon and jets originating from bottom (b) quarks. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Find First Evidence for Production of Top Quarks in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions

Nov 16, 2020 by News Staff

New results from the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider demonstrate for the first time that top quarks are produced in nucleus-nucleus...

An artist’s impression of the planetary system LHS 1140. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Three Planets Orbit Nearby Red Dwarf LHS 1140

Nov 16, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations...

The ruins of the Barbegal mill complex. Image credit: Robert Fabre.

Researchers Unravel Enigma of Barbegal Watermills, World’s First Industrial Complex

Nov 16, 2020 by News Staff

The Barbegal watermill complex, a unique cluster of 16 Roman waterwheels in southern France, was the first known attempt in Europe to set up an industrial-scale...

This artist’s concept depicts the dry environment seen at Mars today versus the early Martian environment. Image credit: Simon Fraser University.

Global and Regional Dust Storms Cause Mars to Lose Water

Nov 13, 2020 by News Staff

Mars was once a wet planet, but it has lost most of its water through reactions that produce hydrogen. In standard models, molecular hydrogen produced...

The Zoonomia Project brings the fraction of eutherian mammal families that are represented by at least one assembly to 83%. This image shows the brown-throated sloth (Bradypus variegatus) in the Cahuita National Park, Costa Rica. Image credit: Christian Mehlführer / CC BY 2.5.

Scientists Sequence Genomes of 131 Placental Mammal Species

Nov 13, 2020 by News Staff

In a study that has implications to advance medicine and biodiversity conservation, a large international consortium of researchers involved in the Zoonomia...

This image shows the glow from the GRB 200522A kilonova caused by the merger of two neutron stars. Image credit: NASA / ESA / W. Fong, Northwestern University / T. Laskar, University of Bath.

Hubble Detects Unexplained Near-Infrared Emission from Neutron-Star Merger

Nov 13, 2020 by News Staff

Several billion years ago, a short gamma-ray burst unleashed more energy in a half-second than our Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime....

Feng et al. report a substantial step towards the dense representation of avian phylogenetic and molecular diversity, by analyzing 363 genomes from 92.4% of bird families. Image credit: Jon Fjeldsa / Josefin Stiller / University of Copenhagen.

Researchers Sequence Genomes of 363 Bird Species

Nov 12, 2020 by News Staff

Scientists from the Bird 10,000 Genomes Project have successfully sequenced and analyzed the genomes of a total of 363 bird species from 92.4% (218 out...

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