ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Researchers have discovered a supermassive black hole binary system, one of only two known such systems.

Researchers have recently discovered a breakthrough in magnetic reconnection that could ultimately help predict space weather.

With the help of special telescopes, researchers have observed a cosmic particle accelerator as never before. Observations made with the gamma ray observatory H.E.S.S. in Namibia show for the first time the course of an acceleration process in a stellar process called a nova, which comprises powerful eruptions on the surface of a white dwarf. A nova creates a shock wave that tears through the surrounding medium, pulling particles with it and accelerating them to extreme energies. Surprisingly, the nova 'RS Ophiuchi' seems to cause particles to accelerate at speeds reaching the theoretical limit, corresponding to ideal conditions.

Astronomers have observed primordial material that may be giving birth to three planetary systems around a binary star in unprecedented detail.

The Dragonfly telescope is undergoing a metamorphosis. For the past decade, the Dragonfly Telephoto Array has conducted groundbreaking science by detecting faint starlight within dimly lit parts of the night sky. The telescope uses clusters of telephoto lenses to create images, much the way a dragonfly's eyes gather visual data.

Scientists have long known that the hydrogen gas in galaxy clusters is searingly hot -- about 10 million degrees Kelvin, or roughly the same temperature as the center of the sun -- which is so hot that hydrogen atoms cannot exist. Instead the gas is a plasma consisting of protons and electrons. But a puzzle persists: There is no straightforward explanation for why or how the gas stays so hot. According to the normal rules of physics, it should have cooled within the age of the universe. But it hasn't. Scientists have created conditions similar to the hot gas in gigantic galaxy clusters.