Planets could form around supermassive black holes, new study shows
digitaltrends.com – At the heart of our galaxy lies a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of our sun. It's believed most other galaxies have an enormous black hole at their center, too. But astronomers have discovered something unexpected about these monstrous black holes. It may be possible for planets to orbit around them.
Source: Keiichi Wada, Yusuke Tsukamoto, Eiichiro Kokubo. Planet Formation around Super Massive Black Holes in the Active Galactic Nuclei. arXiv, 2019.
44,000-Year-Old Cave Art Shows A Hunt Filled With Fantastical Creatures
discovermagazine.com – Found in Indonesia, the ancient paintings show beings that archaeologists interpret as half-human, half-animal hunters.
Source: Maxime Aubert, et al. Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art. Nature, 2019.
Greenland Now Loses Ice Faster, Puts Millions At Risk Of Coastal Flooding
medicaldaily.com – New satellite study found that the Greenland ice sheet has been losing ice more than seven times each year than it did in the 1990s, which may soon put 40 million people at risk of coastal flooding due to sea level rise.
Source: Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018. Nature, 2019.
This 3D-printed Stanford bunny also holds the data for its own reproduction
arstechnica.com – "Just like real rabbits, our rabbit also carries its own blueprint."
Source: Julian Koch, et al. A DNA-of-things storage architecture to create materials with embedded memory. Nature Biotechnology, 2019.
Mysterious stripes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus may have a new origin story
popsci.com – When the Cassini spacecraft swung by Saturn’s moon Enceladus in 2005, its cameras glimpsed a particularly arresting feature of the alien world: tiger stripes. Where fractures in Europa’s icy shell race across the surface at random angles, Enceladus’s surface hosts five epic fissures running in parallel across its southern pole, each stretching roughly 80 miles in length. Now a team of physicists suggests they’ve cracked the origin of these stripes.
Source: Douglas J. Hemingway, Maxwell L. Rudolph, Michael Manga. Cascading parallel fractures on Enceladus. Nature Astronomy, 2019.
Heatwaves on multiple continents linked by jet stream tendency
arstechnica.com – Two studies examine weather patterns and agriculture around the world.
Source: Kai Kornhuber, et al. Amplified Rossby waves enhance risk of concurrent heatwaves in major breadbasket regions. Nature Climate Change, 2019.
Map reveals land beneath Antarctic ice sheet in unprecedented detail
upi.com – Scientists have successfully mapped the topography of the land beneath Antarctica's ice sheet at high resolution by combining radar observations with ice volume and flow velocity data.
Source: Deep glacial troughs and stabilizing ridges unveiled beneath the margins of the Antarctic ice sheet. Nature Geoscience, 2019.
White dwarf star covering itself with the atmosphere of a hot Neptune
arstechnica.com – First-of-its-kind system requires a rare combination of events.
Source: Boris T. Gänsicke, et al. Accretion of a giant planet onto a white dwarf star. Nature, 2019.
NASA Releases First Science Results from Parker Solar Probe Mission
sci-news.com – The four instruments of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a robotic spacecraft designed to explore the Sun’s atmosphere, have returned unprecedented science data from near our star, culminating in new discoveries published this week in a series of four papers in the journal Nature.
Source: J. C. Kasper, et al. Alfvénic velocity spikes and rotational flows in the near-Sun solar wind. Nature, 2019.
Dinosaur feathers were crawling with lice, amber fossils show
zmescience.com – It's the oldest evidence of insects feeding on feathers.
Source: Taiping Gao, et al. New insects feeding on dinosaur feathers in mid-Cretaceous amber. Nature Communications, 2019.
NASA Releases First Science Results from Parker Solar Probe Mission
sci-news.com – The four instruments of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a robotic spacecraft designed to explore the Sun’s atmosphere, have returned unprecedented science data from near our star, culminating in new discoveries published this week in a series of four papers in the journal Nature.
Source: D. J. McComas, et al. Probing the energetic particle environment near the Sun. Nature, 2019.