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A mysterious repeating radio signal from space revealed last year is now the fifth fast radio burst to be tracked back to its source galaxy. It's a location unlike any of the others, and astronomers are having to rethink their previous assumptions about how these signals are generated. The origin of this repeating signal is a spiral galaxy, located 500 million light-years from Earth, making it the closest known source of what we call fast radio bursts (FRBs) yet. And the FRBs are emanating specifically from a region just seven light-years across - a region that's alive with star formation....

A stunning new panoramic image of the Milky Way is revealing all sorts of fresh insight. The image shows the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, stretching about 600 light-years across, and reveals never-before-seen details of the Arches cluster, which is densest star cluster in our galaxy. And that bright white splotch in the middle of the image? That's the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is illuminated on all sides.

No one really knows what happens inside an atom. But two competing groups of scientists think they've figured it out. And both are racing to prove that their own vision is correct. Here's what we know for sure: Electrons whiz around "orbitals" in an atom's outer shell. Then there's a whole lot of empty space. And then, right in the center of that space, there's a tiny nucleus — a dense knot of protons and neutrons that give the atom most of its mass. Those protons and neutrons cluster together, bound by what's called the strong force. And the numbers...

...Earth was bombarded on a regular basis during its formative years -- by meteorites and other space rocks. Some of those collisions left behind evidence that is still observable today in the form of craters. One of them is Mistastin Lake crater located in Labrador Canada, which is approximately 28 kilometers across, suggesting that the object that struck the Earth there was large. The researchers dated the collision that caused the crater back to approximately 38 million years ago... In studying the crater, the researchers found evidence of zircon, a common mineral, being changed into cubic zirconia. Prior work with...

A massive lightning strike which hit the Isle of Lewis more than 3,000 years ago may have inspired ancient civilisations to build stone circles, academics believe. Scientists studying a prehistoric stone circle on the Outer Hebrides island discovered evidence of a lightning strike on a nearby site where a circle had been hidden beneath a peat bog. Just one stone remained standing at the site, known as Site XI or Airigh na Beinne Bige, which overlooks the main stone circle, Tursachan Chalanais, at Calanais on the Isle of Lewis. But it is believed that the single stone was once part...

Betelgeuse has gotten dramatically dimmer over the last few weeks, astronomers say the change probably isn’t a symptom of an impending stellar explosion. That’s good news for any planets in the star’s orbit... But it’s disappointing news for Earth-based astronomers and stargazers, who haven’t been able to watch the death of a star with their unaided eyes since 1987, and may not have another chance for centuries. In 1987, a supernova called SN 1987A, marked the death of a blue giant star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the dwarf galaxies that orbits the Milky Way. 168,000 years after...

Davenport Perihelion, or Earth's closest approach to sun in it's orbit, occurs tonight. Perihelion is the annual closest approach to the sun. The sun will be roughly 91.4 million miles away...

Including the two supermoons, there will be a total of 13 full moons during the year. There will also be two full moons in the month of October alone, the second of which is called a blue moon. Here's the special, and somewhat eerie, part. The blue moon will fall on Halloween night. Blue moons typically happen once every two or three years, but it's even more rare to have it on Halloween. The next blue moon to fall on Halloween will be in 2039.

Mission operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have lost contact with the ASTERIA satellite, a briefcase-sized spacecraft designed to study planets outside our solar system. The last successful communication with ASTERIA, short for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics, was on Dec. 5; attempts to contact it are expected to continue into March 2020. ASTERIA belongs to a category of satellites called CubeSats, which vary in size but are typically smaller than a suitcase. Deployed into Earth orbit from the space station on Nov. 20, 2017, the technology demonstration mission showed that many technologies necessary for...

The closest it is expected to get is four lunar distances -- about 1 million miles – at approximately 9 am EST. Tracking is available on The Sky Live, which calculates that 2019 AE3 will technically be visible from New York between around 1 a.m. and 10 am. The event is set to occur just three days after five sizeable NEOs flew by the earth on the same day...[including one] similar in size to 2019 AE3 practically skimmed it just 415,000 miles away.

The Marree Man is a geoglyph spanning 2.2 miles (or 3.5 kilometers) head-to-toe, and can be found in the middle of South Australia's desert near a town called Marree, itself 365 miles (589 kilometers) from the city of Adelaide. The image of a hunter with what might be a stick (or a boomerang) in his hand was chosen as NASA's Image of the Day on Sunday. It was taken by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on June 22, 2019. The mysterious figure was first spotted in 1998, when a pilot noticed the carvings on a plateau, but has faded as...

A NASA intern has discovered a new type of aurora in 3-year-old video footage of the Arctic sky. With the help of NASA scientists and a satellite, Jennifer Briggs, a physics student at Pepperdine University, connected the unusual aurora to a sudden retreat in Earth's magnetic field. It's the first time scientists have seen an aurora caused solely by a compression of Earth's magnetic field. Usually, auroras dance across the sky when a lot of high-energy particles from the sun, called solar wind, flood over Earth. But in this case, the sun didn't show any unusual or heightened activity.

This illustration depicts the Sun-like star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered in 2012–2014. These planets are all roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass. This means the planets have an extraordinarily low density, more like that of Styrofoam rather than rock or water, based on new Hubble Space Telescope observations. The planets may have formed much farther from their star and migrated inward. Now their puffed-up hydrogen/helium atmospheres are bleeding off into space. Eventually, much smaller planets might be left behind. The background starfield is correctly plotted as...

The theoretical notion of a 'quantum heat engine' has been around for several decades. It was first introduced around sixty years ago by Scovil and Schulz-DuBois, two physicists at Bell Labs who drew an analogy between three-level masers and thermal machines. In the years that followed, other researchers have developed a variety of theories building on the ideas of Scovil and Schulz-DuBois, introducing proposals of thermodynamic cycles at the quantum scale. Very recently, physicists have started testing some of these theories in experimental settings. One of these experiments was carried out by a team of researchers at the University of...

When you take a look at the stars in the night sky, they generally appear the same regardless of time. Only a small number of stars ever appear to change on human timescales, as most stars burn through their fuel very stably, with almost no variation in their continuous brightness. The few stars that do appear to change are either intrinsically variable, members of multi-star systems, or go through an enormous evolutionary change. When very massive stars get close to the end of their lives, they start varying by tremendous amounts, and do so with significant irregularity. At a critical...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other federal agencies have failed to prevent China from openly recruiting American scientific experts in exchange for payment and perks. This, according to Judicial Watch. The Judicial Watch story relies on a report published by the Senate Homeland Security Committee. According to Judicial Watch, “This report exposes how American taxpayer funded research has contributed to China’s global rise over the last 20 years.” The U.S. Senate report says the U.S. taxpayers spend over $150 billion a year on scientific research. Most of the federal agencies conducting this research have been impacted by the...

Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. The team managed to send information from one chip to another instantly without them being physically or electronically connected, in a feat that opens the door for quantum computers and quantum internet. This kind of teleportation is made possible by a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, where two particles become so entwined with each other that they can “communicate” over long distances. Changing the properties of one particle will cause the other to instantly change too, no...

Abstract Arterial calcification (AC) is generally regarded as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. In rats, inactivation of MGP by treatment with the vitamin K antagonist warfarin leads to rapid calcification of the arteries. Both of the Vitamin K (VK)-rich diets decreased the arterial calcium content by some 50%. In addition, arterial distensibility was restored by the VK-rich diet. Using MGP antibodies, local VK deficiency was demonstrated at sites of calcification. This is the first study in rats demonstrating that AC and the resulting decreased arterial distensibility are reversible by high-VK intake. Introduction Arterial calcification is an...

More space rocks seem to be approaching Earth’s territory, and a new report reveals another one may bring in disasters. NASA has spotted an asteroid traveling at 63,000 miles per hour, and there is a possibility that it can impact the Earth. Express reports that the space agency recently tracked down an asteroid named 101955 Bennu but formally known as 1999 RQ36, hurtling towards Earth at a rapid speed of 63,000 miles per hour. NASA has not only labeled this a Potentially Hazardous Object or PHO, but they have also classified RQ36 with the second-highest rating on the Palermo Technical...

The tip came from a lawyer, a faithful reader from Brooklyn named Harvey Herbert- An Egyptian hieroglyphic papyrus now in the Brooklyn Museum mentions an Asiatic slave named Shiphrah. Shiphrah, of course, is the name of one of the Hebrew midwives (the other is Puah) whom Pharaoh summoned to carry out his order that all boys born to the enslaved Israelites be killed (Exodus 1-15)... And here was an Asiatic slave with this same name mentioned in an Egyptian papyrus written in hieroglyphics... All I can do is report what to some (surely, to me) are previously unknown facts that...