The ability to scan planets in other solar systems is growing. The new achievement in the race of progress is the observation of the stormy atmosphere of a planet located 150 light-years from Earth, which has detected the existence of strong winds on it.

A team of astronomers from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, the Institute of Space Research of the nation, and MIT (U.S.) has become the first to measure the wind in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. By detecting the strong winds in HD209458b, a planet that has a little more than half the mass of Jupiter, the researchers could measure the motion of the planet to orbit around its star, which is also another milestone never before achieved in exoplanet research. (more…)

Certain trace data from a cosmic being made by NASA’s Swift satellite has helped a team of astronomers to solve a mystery raised some time ago. What is the reason why some black holes (a few percent of the known) originating from the emission of large amounts of energy?

Only about one percent of super-massive black holes exhibit this behavior. The new findings confirm that the black holes will light up when galaxies collide and the data can provide a clearer perspective on the future behavior of the central black hole of our galaxy, the Milky Way. (more…)

Researchers have been playing for the first time in complex three-dimensional computer simulations, asymmetries and accumulations of iron in rapid evolution of supernovae that were observed at the time. The simulations have been successfully recreating the explosion from milliseconds after the start of the outbreak until the disappearance of the star itself several hours later. (more…)

Is our universe is inside a wormhole, which in turn is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe?

After making a deep analysis by means of Euclidian mathematical modeling, the theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski, from the University of Indiana in Bloomington, has come the conclusion that all the black holes could lodge wormholes, inside which created universes exist in the same time that their black holes.

This suggests a scenario in which the universe is born from inside a wormhole (also known as Einstein-Rosen Bridge). (more…)

Using a radio telescope of the CSIRO, an international team of researchers has captured a huge cloud of cosmic gas and dust in the process of collapsing on itself, a discovery that could help solve one of the classic riddles in astronomy: How did massive stars form?

Astronomers have a fairly clear idea of how they form stars like our Sun from clouds of gas and dust, but not how they do the heavier stars, which have a mass of ten or more times the Sun, despite many years of research have been devoted to the topic. So, astronomers are still debating about the physical processes that could lead to the formation of these big stars, as noted Peter Barnes of the University of Florida.

Massive stars are rare. They represent only a small percentage of all the stars, and only formed in significant amounts of condensation of some very massive cloud, a process that leads to the creation of hundreds of stars of different masses. The small gas clouds do not seem likely to generate big stars. (more…)

The rain of cosmic rays falls to us are constantly that collide with atoms in the atmosphere. Cosmic rays are not really rays but are streams of particles. Of these, ninety percent are protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, and most of the rest are heavier nuclei, including iron. Some originate in our own Sun, but most come from much further in other regions of the Milky Way or even beyond.

As indicated by Spencer Klein, Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the most energetic cosmic rays are the most rare and constitute the greatest mystery. (more…)

The observations of how the youngest neutron star known has cooled in the last decade are giving astronomers new insights into the interior of these super-dense dead stars.

Wynn Ho, University of Southampton, UK and Craig Heinke, University of Alberta in Canada, measured the temperature of the neutron star in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, using data obtained by the Centre Chandra X-ray of NASA between 2000 and 2009. (more…)