News by Subject Space & Planetary

Astronomers have found the best evidence for the perpetrator of a cosmic homicide: a black hole of an elusive class known as "intermediate-mass," which betrayed its existence by tearing apart a wayward star that passed too close.

A new study by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan -- published today in the journal Science - concludes that a possible dark matter-related explanation for a mysterious light signature in space is largely ruled out.

East Antarctica's Denman Glacier has retreated 5 kilometers, nearly 3 miles, in the past 22 years, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are concerned that the shape of the ground surface beneath the ice sheet could make it even more susceptible to climate-driven collapse.

Engineering researchers have demonstrated that composite metal foams (CMFs) can pass so-called 'simulated pool fire testing' with flying colors, moving the material closer to use in applications such as packaging and transportation of hazardous materials. In addition, researchers used this experimental data to develop a model for predicting how variations in the CMF would affect its performance.

In a new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists from the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory describe Greenland's loss of 600 billion tons of ice in the summer of 2019, raising global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters in a short time.

Despite Mercury's 400 C daytime heat, there is ice at its caps, and now a study shows how that Vulcan scorch probably helps the planet closest to the sun make some of that ice.