Astronomers have learned that the pull of gravity can sometimes overcome the strong magnetic fields found in great star-forming clouds in space. The resulting weakly magnetized gas flow can feed the growth of new stars. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/magnetized-rivers-feed-star-birth…
Tag: Max Planck
Astronomers spy a Milky Way look-alike 12 billion light-years away
This distant galaxy – SPT0418-47 – surprised astronomers by being organized enough to have a spinning disk and a galactic bulge, early in the history of our universe. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/alma-distant-milky-way-lookalike-galaxy-spt0418-47…
Do Animals Really Anticipate Earthquakes? Sensors Hint They Do
An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American:
For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic events: dogs barking incessantly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds… Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, both in Germany, along with a multinational team of colleagues, say they have managed to precisely measure…
AI Distinguishes Birds That Even Experts Can’t
Slashdot reader sciencehabit quote Science magazine:
It’s a fact of life for birders that some species are fiendishly difficult to tell apart — in particular, the sparrows and drab songbirds dubbed “little brown jobs.” Distinguishing individuals is nearly impossible. Now, a computer program analyzing photos and videos has accomplished that feat. The advance promises to reveal new information on bird behaviors… The…
Spacecraft Made From Ultra Thin Foam Could Reach Proxima Centauri In 185 Years
An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek:
A hypothetical spacecraft made from an extremely thin layer of a synthetic foam could technically make it to our closest neighboring star Proxima Centauri in just 185 years, scientists have said. If Voyager were to make the same journey, it would take around 73,000 years, according to NASA. In a study that is due to be published…
The Anglerfish Deleted Its Immune System To Fuse With Its Mate
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: There are few animals more bizarre than the anglerfish, a species that has so much trouble finding a mate that when the male and female do connect underwater, males actually fuse their tissue with the females for life. After the merger, the two share a single respiratory and digestive system. Now scientists have…
A growing stellar system directly fed by the mother cloud
For the first time, astronomers have observed a conveyor belt from the outskirts of a star-forming dense cloud directly depositing material near a pair of young forming stars. Scientists at the German Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and the French Institut de Radioastonomie Millimétrique (IRAM) found that gas motions in the conveyor belt, dubbed a “streamer,” mainly obey the…
Close-ups of the sun
Only a few months after its launch, ESA’s Solar Orbiter has captured images of the sun from a previously unattainable distance. Among other things, these images reveal structures in the sun’s atmosphere that could possibly be interpreted as so-called nanoflares, very small bursts of radiation. The images from the six remote sensing instruments published today were taken in the days before…
Physicists engineer an optical mirror made of only a few hundred atoms
Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) have engineered the lightest optical mirror imaginable. The novel metamaterial is made of a single structured layer that consists only of a few hundred identical atoms. The atoms are arranged in the two dimensional array of an optical lattice formed by interfering laser beams. The research results are the first experimental…
About eight percent of red giants are covered by sunspot-like dark areas.
Starspots are more common among red giant stars than previously thought. In the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany report that approximately eight percent of red giants exhibit such spots. They are the expression of strong magnetic fields at the stellar surface. These magnetic fields are created deep inside…