Science News Astronomy Kepler-34b Helps

Researchers reporting in the Astrophysical Journal Letters have found that the majority of circumbinary planets – planets that orbit two stars – were actually formed much further away from their binary stars and then migrated to their current locations. This artist’s impression shows an extrasolar gas giant orbiting a binary star system. Image credit: NASA / G. Bacon, STScI. There...

Planetary scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and European Space Astronomy have created a map of more than 100,000 asteroids throughout the Solar System, revealing the size, composition and location of each asteroid and showing that so-called ‘rogue’ asteroids are actually more common than previously thought. This is an artist’s impression of the triple asteroid system...

A new study published in the journal PLoS ONE has uncovered about 400 years of intensive land use around the ancient city of Mahendraparvata, Cambodia. Buddhist monks in front of the reflection pool at Angkor Wat, the capital of the Khmer Empire. The founding city of the Empire was called Mahendraparvata. Image credit: Sam Garza / CC BY 2.0. Mahendraparvata was founded by King Jayavarman II –...

Paleontologists from the United States and China have described a new large plant-eating dinosaur that lived in what is now northwestern China during the early Cretaceous, about 100 million years ago. Reconstruction of Yongjinglong datangi. Scale bar – 60 cm. Image credit: Li L-G et al. The new dinosaur, named Yongjinglong datangi, belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as Titanosauria. Three...

A multinational group of biologists has described a new species of sweeper from the waters of the Indian Ocean. Pempheris flavicycla marisrubri, Ras Mohammed, Red Sea. Image credit: S.V. Bogorodsky. Sweeper is the common name used for small, tropical fish in the family Pempheridae, including two genera – Parapriacanthus and Pempheris. The newly discovered species has been named Pempheris flavicycla. “The...

Physicists from CERN’s Atomic Spectroscopy and Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons (ASACUSA) project say they have produced at least 80 atoms of antihydrogen. Hydrogen’s electron and proton have oppositely charged antimatter counterparts in the antihydrogen: the positron and antiproton. Image credit: NSF. Current theories predict that the Universe could just as easily be made of antimatter...

According to a new study published in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology, human lungs have odor receptors. A diagram of the airway lining suggests how the pulmonary neuroendocrine cells (red) trigger a response to inhaled chemicals. When a chemical (orange triangle) docks on a receptor (black) they dump secretory chemicals (thin orange arrows), which have an immediate...

The genome sequence of a man who lived in what is modern Spain 7,000 years ago reveals that European hunter-gatherers were dark-skinned and blue-eyed. This is an artist’s impression of a male hunter-gatherer who lived in what is modern Spain 7,000 years ago. Image credit: CSIC. Two Mesolithic male skeletons, labeled La Brana-1 and La Brana-2, were discovered in a deep subterranean cave at the...

An anomalous magma chamber has been observed at 8–11 km depth beneath the upper east rift zone of one of the world’s most active volcanoes – Kilauea, Hawaii. Kilauea is the most active of the five volcanoes that together form the island of Hawaii. Image credit: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science. Using seismic data, a group of volcanologists led by...