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Two Monsters, One Galaxy, and a Collision 100 Years Away!
Space is full of objects that push the boundaries of imagination, but few do it quite as effectively as a black hole. At its simplest, a black hole is a region of space where gravity has become so overwhelmingly powerful that nothing, no matter, no light, nothing can escape its grip. They form when massive
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A New Study Narrows the Search for Water on the Moon
When India’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter released the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) into the Shackleton crater on the Moon, they confirmed something scientists had speculated about for decades. The Moon, an airless and vacuum-desiccated body, has abundant sources of water ice around its poles! Located in the many craters that litter the region, these permanently shadowed regions
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Are Neutrinos Their Own Evil Twins? Part 2: The Weak Left-Hander
(This is Part 2 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 first.) What I’m about to say may be some small comfort for those of you who are left-handed and feel like the world isn’t constructed with you in mind. When it comes
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The Chip That Could Survive Venus
Every electronic device you have ever owned shares a critical weakness. Push it past roughly 200 degrees Celsius and it begins to fail. Your phone, your car’s computer, the satellites orbiting above your head right now, all of them have the same thermal ceiling baked into their design. For decades, that ceiling has been one
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The Craters that Made Us
How does something come from nothing? It is perhaps the most profound question in all of science and one we still cannot fully answer. How did a barren, lifeless planet transform itself, over billions of years, into a world teeming with life? Where did it actually begin? For decades, deep sea hydrothermal vents have been
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The Moon Just Got a New Scar
Look up at a full Moon on a clear night and you are staring at a face that has been punched, gouged, and battered for four billion years. Those dark patches are vast basins blasted open by impacts so colossal they reshaped a world. The lighter highlands are pocked and pitted, crater upon crater, each
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Are Neutrinos Their Own Evil Twins? Part 1: So We’re Going to Redefine “Particle”
On March 25, 1938, a 31-year-old physicist named Ettore Majorana bought a ticket for a ferry from Palermo to Naples. That night, before boarding, he sent a letter to Antonio Carrelli, director of the Naples Physics Institute: Dear Carrelli, I made a decision that has become unavoidable. There isn’t a bit of selfishness in it,
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Student Team Finds One of the Oldest Stars in the Universe that Migrated to the Milky Way
Ten undergraduate students from the University of Chicago made an astounding discovery using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). As part of their “Field Course in Astrophysics,” they located one of the oldest stars in the Universe living in the Milky Way. The star, SDSS J0715-7334, is a red giant with 29 times
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Why Does Jupiter Have More Large Moons than Saturn?
Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in the Solar System, are known for their large and varied systems of moons. At present count, Jupiter has more than 100 moons, while Saturn has more than double that, with over 280 known satellites. However, Jupiter’s system of satellites includes four large moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede,
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It’s Not Supposed To Be Like This: A Giant Planet Orbits A Small Star
The nebular hypothesis states that stars and the planets that orbit them form from the same reservoir of material, called a solar nebula. It’s the most commonly accepted explanation for how solar systems form. But despite its ability to explain many things about solar system formation, there are some outstanding questions. The study of exoplanets
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