A mirror image of Earth and sun

Among the more than 4,000 known exoplanets, KOI-456.04 is something special: less than twice the size of Earth, it orbits a sun-like star. And it does so with a star-planet distance that could permit planetary surface temperatures ...

Modern science reveals ancient secret in Japanese literature

Nearly a millennium and a half ago, red light streaked across the night sky over Japan. Witnesses compared it to the tail of a pheasant—it appeared as a fan of beautiful red feathers stretched across the sky. Since the ...

ESO telescope sees surface of dim Betelgeuse

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured the unprecedented dimming of Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion. The stunning new images of the star's surface show not only the ...

Betelgeuse continues to dim, diminishes to 1.506 magnitude

Betelgeuse keeps getting dimmer, and everyone is wondering what exactly that means. The star will go supernova at the end of its life, but that's not projected to happen for tens of thousands of years or so. So what's causing ...

Waiting for Betelgeuse: what's up with the tempestuous star?

Have you noticed that Orion the Hunter—one of the most iconic and familiar of the wintertime constellations—is looking a little… different as of late? The culprit is its upper shoulder star Alpha Orionis, aka Betelgeuse, ...

Martian aurora offers climate change clues, research reports

A newly published study, presented on Dec. 12 at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting, reveals that a type of Martian aurora originally detected by NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is in fact the most common aurora on the ...

Researchers discover new way to split and sum photons with silicon

A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Riverside have found a way to produce a long-hypothesized phenomenon—the transfer of energy between silicon and organic, carbon-based ...

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