Astronomers Zoom in on a Galaxy 9 Billion Light-years Away Thanks to Gravitational Lensing

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

(Credit: MIT/Image courtesy of the researchers) When even the most powerful telescopes can’t capture the views you want, it helps to have natural magnifying glasses to rely on. In a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers describe how they zoomed in to capture a young, star-forming galaxy roughly nine billion light-years away in X-ray light. To study such a distant galaxy, they used the fact that massive objects can warp space-time around them and magnify light ...read more

The Cosmos’ Most Powerful Magnets May Form When Stars Collide

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

These snapshots of two merging stars in action show the overall strength of the magnetic field in color (yellow is more magnetic), as well as the magnetic field lines (hatching). The stars on the left, which don't have very strong magnetic fields, are just about to merge into a more massive and magnetic star (right). According to new research, such mergers can dramatically bolster the strength of the final star's magnetic field. (Credit: F. Schneider et al./Nature volume 574, pages 211–214 ...read more

This Interstellar Space Rock Looks a Lot Like Our Own Solar System’s Comets

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

The Gemini Observatory in Hawaii caught this first-ever color image of the interstellar comet Borisov and its faint tail. (Credit:Composite image by Travis Rector. Credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA) Asteroids, comets and other rocky objects litter the solar system, left over from when the planets formed. Scientists study these space rocks to learn about what the early solar system was like. Now, we’re entering an era in which we can learn about alien planetary systems in the same way, ...read more

Fatal Familial Insomnia: The Disease That Kills By Stealing Sleep

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

(Credit: Rachata Teyparsit/Shutterstock) A brief bout of insomnia can be maddening. You know what it feels like. We all do. Lying awake chasing feverish thoughts from our minds while the slow tick of passing minutes compounds sleep-stealing anxiety. For most of us these episodes are a brief interruption to our sleep schedules. Others experience more persistent insomnia, but at a level that's often manageable. But for a very rare group of people with a frightening disease called fatal fami ...read more

Alexei Leonov, First Person to Walk in Space, Dies at 85

Posted on Categories Discover Magazine

Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov trains for the Apollo-Soyuz mission in April 1975 . (Credit: NASA) Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space, has died at the age of 85 at the Burdenko Military Hospital in Moscow. His death was announced Friday, Oct. 11, by Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. Born in 1934, Leonov became the eleventh Soviet cosmonaut and achieved major milestones of space exploration. During the Voskhod 2 mission, on March 18, 1965, he exited his capsule ...read more