News by Subject Space & Planetary

These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images compare two diverse views of the roiling heart of a vast stellar nursery, known as the Lagoon Nebula. The images, one taken in visible and the other in infrared light, celebrate Hubble's 28th anniversary in space.

An international team of astronomers has revealed the 'DNA' of more than 350,000 stars in the Milky Way, which should help them find the siblings of the sun, now scattered across the sky. This is the first major announcement of an ambitious survey as part of a quest to uncover the formulation and evolution of galaxies -- after the Australian-led Galactic Archaeology survey, called GALAH, commenced three years ago.

With an instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile scientists of ETH Zurich observed planet-forming disks around young stars similar to the sun 4,5 billion years ago. Surprisingly, the disks are very different. The data will help to shed more light on the formation processes of planets.

A well-known experiment with young people bouncing a ball showed that when an observer focuses on counting the passes, he does not detect if someone crosses the stage disguised as a gorilla. According to researchers at the University of Cádiz (Spain), something similar could be happening to us when we try to discover intelligent non-earthly signals, which perhaps manifest themselves in dimensions that escape our perception, such as the unknown dark matter and energy.

Despite their appearance solar tornadoes are not rotating after all, according to a European team of scientists. A new analysis of these gigantic structures, each one several times the size of the Earth, indicates that they may have been misnamed because scientists have so far only been able to observe them using 2-dimensional images.

Marine animals such as mantis shrimp and squid have inspired a new mode of underwater navigation that allows for greater accuracy. University of Queensland Queensland Brain Institute scientists are part of a group of researchers who have developed the technique using imaging equipment that was sensitive to polarizing light.