As NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its historic first flight on Mars, researchers made new discoveries even deeper in space during the week of April 14–21.
Researchers from Japan and the U.S. discovered stable titanium in the remnants of the Cas A supernova. Its presence suggests previous simulations showing neutrinos driving stellar explosions are accurate.
NASA released a visualization showing the interplay of accretion disks of two orbiting supermassive black holes. It demonstrates how the gravity from such binary black holes bends light.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured evidence of gravitational lensing in the galaxy cluster Abell 2813. The phenomenon occurs when light bends around a massive object and is used as proof of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Researchers in Japan developed an extraordinarily high-resolution map of the Orion Nebula Cluster, finding evidence for the theory that a new star’s mass is determined by how much gas it accretes while forming — not the size of its core.
Researchers in the Canary Islands discovered a super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf 36 light-years from Earth. The planet, three times the mass of Earth, is believed to a rocky world and could be the subject of future study with very large diameter telescopes.
Scientists in Japan discovered an amphibious centipede, named Ryuji-ômukade after a dragon god of local Okinawan folklore. It’s only the third amphibious centipede ever discovered, and the first new centipede found in Japan in 143 years.
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter completed its first test flight on Mars. The historic event marks the first guided, powered flight on another planet.
Analysis of the Little Foot Australopithecus skeleton by the University of Southern California revealed apelike shoulders adapted for climbing trees. The research suggests there were similarities between early humans and other apes much more recently than previous findings claimed.
Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology captured the first image of the internal orbits of an exciton. These particles are crucial for making semiconductors work. They also can only exist for fractions of a second, making them incredibly difficult to study.
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