Two of the strangest, most colossal structures in the Milky Way may have formed in a 100,000-year-long explosion at our galaxy’s center, new research suggests. Those structures — named the Fermi bubbles and eROSITA bubbles after the respective telescopes that discovered them — straddle the Milky Way’s center in an enormous hourglass shape, with one … Read more
The Goldilocks zone gets its name from the fairy tale, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”. Goldilocks is a fussy little girl whose porridge has to be just right — neither too hot nor too cold. It’s the same with life itself — or at least, the kind of water-based life we’re familiar with on Earth. … Read more
Large galaxies may steal dark matter from smaller galaxies they nearly collide with, new research suggests. Scientists from the University of California, Irvine and Pomona College used computer models to simulate the evolution of a corner of the universe about 60 million light-years across. The new computer models, which weren’t designed to do so, created … Read more
One of the biggest cosmological mysteries is why the universe is made up of way more matter than antimatter, essentially why we exist. Now, a team of theoretical physicists says they know how to find the answer. All they need to do is detect the gravitational waves produced by bizarre quantum objects called Q balls. … Read more
A wild new theory suggests there may be another “anti-universe,” running backward in time prior to the Big Bang. The idea assumes that the early universe was small, hot and dense — and so uniform that time looks symmetric going backward and forward. If true, the new theory means that dark matter isn’t so mysterious; … Read more
Corkscrewing through the cosmos, three distant galaxies collide in a stunning new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This cosmic crash is known as a triple galaxy merger, when three galaxies slowly draw each other nearer and tear each other apart with their competing gravitational forces. Mergers like these are common throughout the universe, … Read more
Stunning images snapped by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have given the very first visible light glimpse of Venus’ red-hot surface, revealing continents, plains and plateaus on the inhospitable volcanic world. Peering beneath the thick and toxic Venusian clouds with the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument, NASA scientists spotted a bevy of geological … Read more
Astronomers have finally seen the remnants of a dead planet as it tumbled onto the surface of a dead star – and in doing so, they confirmed decades of speculation about what happens to solar systems that reach the end of their lives. These explosive observations — which were taken with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory … Read more
Observations by a long-running Mars mission suggest that liquid water may have flowed on the Red Planet as little as 2 billion years ago, much later than scientists once thought. Scientists charted the presence of chloride salt deposits left behind by flowing water using years of data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: An extremely powerful solar storm pummeled our planet 9,200 years ago, leaving permanent scars on the ice buried deep below Greenland and … Read more
