Thursday, Oct 30th
Last update07:48:09 AM GMT
Science Glance
For the first time, astronomers in Europe have observed star-forming gas clouds in the early universe -- the building blocks of the first galaxies.
The faint glow of ionized carbon was spotted by the European Southern Observatory's ALMA telescope, located in Chile. To find these earliest galaxies, researchers trained the telescope deep into space, past the obvious light of more mature quasars and star-filled galaxies.
Researchers have discovered a massless particle, which was first theorized 85 years ago and thought to be a possible building block for other subatomic particles. The discovery of the Weyl fermion, conceived of by mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1929, could be a boon for electronics, researchers said. It could allow electricity to flow more freely and efficiently providing greater power, most notably for computers.
"The physics of the Weyl fermion are so strange, there could be many things that arise from this particle that we're just not capable of imagining now," M. Zahid Hasan, a professor of physics at Princeton University, said in a press release.
A nearly complete, new dinosaur fossil has been unearthed in China, the first in its family to have unusually short feathered wings.
The new species named Zhenyuanlong suni is a close cousin of the dinosaur predator Velociraptor.
Scientists said the new addition, which lived around 125 million years ago, had multiple layers of dense feathers covering both its wings and tail. Experts, however, believe the feathers are more for display instead of flying.
Signals from a spacecraft 3 billion miles away swept over Earth on Tuesday, confirming that NASA's New Horizons probe survived its history-making Pluto flyby.
The radio signals were received by a Deep Space Network antenna in Spain four and a half hours after they were sent out from the spacecraft at the speed of light, and a full 13 hours after the probe made its close pass. But they electrified hundreds of VIPs, journalists and Pluto fans here at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as if the main event had just happened.
A team of international astronomers may have found a solar system just like ours, lending hope to researchers looking to find rocky Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone.
Using data collected by the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope, researchers recently located a Jupiter-like gas planet orbiting a sun nearly identical to our own.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of a new particle called the pentaquark.
It was first predicted to exist in the 1960s but, much like the Higgs boson particle before it, the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its detection at the LHC. The discovery, which amounts to a new form of matter, was made by the Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment.
The findings have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.
New Horizons has acquired yet another stunning view of Pluto.
The US space agency probe captured the latest image on Tuesday when it was just under eight million km from the dwarf world.
As of Thursday, New Horizons had moved to within six million km, heading for its historic flyby next week.
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