Space sunflower may help snap pictures of planets

A spacecraft that looks like a giant sunflower might one day be used to acquire images of Earth-like rocky planets around nearby stars. The prototype deployable structure, called a starshade, is being developed by NASA's ...

Liberal sprinkling of salt discovered around a young star

New ALMA observations show there is ordinary table salt in a not-so-ordinary location: 1,500 light-years from Earth in the disk surrounding a massive young star. Though salts have been found in the atmospheres of old, dying ...

New forensic technique for identifying cloth fibers

Crime-scene investigators may soon have a new tool to help them catch evildoers. Researchers have demonstrated the proof-of-principle for a new forensic technique to identify individual fibers of cloth, which often all look ...

Astronomers identify signature of Earth-eating stars

(Phys.org) —Some Sun-like stars are 'Earth-eaters.' During their development they ingest large amounts of the rocky material from which 'terrestrial' planets like Earth, Mars and Venus are made.

Studying a Star Before it is Born

(PhysOrg.com) -- The first phase of a star's formation are thought to begin deep inside a natal cloud of gas and dust. In the earliest stages, material coalesces under the influence of gravity into so-called "dense cores," ...

Suzaku 'post-mortem' yields insight into Kepler's supernova

(Phys.org) —An exploding star observed in 1604 by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler held a greater fraction of heavy elements than the sun, according to an analysis of X-ray observations from the Japan-led Suzaku satellite. ...

Research team solves Martian meteorite age puzzle

By directing energy beams at tiny crystals found in a Martian meteorite, a Western University-led team of geologists has proved that the most common group of meteorites from Mars is almost 4 billion years younger than many ...

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