News by Subject Space & Planetary

An international team of researchers developed a unified framework that would account for this apparent break down between classical and quantum physics, and they put it to the test using a quantum satellite called Micius. They published their results ruling out one version of their theory on Sept 19th in Science.

No one knows for certain when Saturn's iconic rings formed, but a new study co-authored by a Southwest Research Institute scientist suggests that they are much older than some scientists think.

Saturn is so beautiful that astronomers cannot resist using the Hubble Space Telescope to take yearly snapshots of the ringed world when it is at its closest distance to Earth. These images, however, are more than just beauty shots. They reveal a planet with a turbulent, dynamic atmosphere.

The theoretical model that astrophysicists have used for 40 years to determine the behavior and future of the sun is broken. It seems fixable, however, with information from experiments at Sandia's Z machine, done at the temperature of the sun, that can accurately determine how much energy the sun's components allow to pass through them.

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal, and researchers don't know why. 'We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,' said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. 'It's usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don't know what is driving this big feast.'

With data from the Hubble Space Telescope, water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of a super-Earth with habitable temperatures.

While every fire needs a spark to ignite and fuel to burn, it's the hot and dry conditions in the atmosphere that determine the likelihood of a fire starting, its intensity and the speed at which it spreads. Over the past several decades, as the world has increasingly warmed, so has its potential to burn.