Before 1997 it was theorized by Schwartz and others that the objects could be a type of reflection nebula, or a type of shock wave formed from the gas emitted from a star interacting with the surrounding matter. The mystery was finally solved when a protostar, unseen in this image, was discovered at the center of the long jets of matter. The outflows of matter, some 10 light-years across, were ejected from the newly born star and violently propelled outwards at speeds of over 150 kilometers per second....

An international team of astronomers has discovered that Tau Ceti, one of the closest and most Sun-like stars, may host five planets, including one in the star’s habitable zone. At a distance of twelve light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the evening sky, Tau Ceti is the closest single star that has the same spectral classification as our Sun. Its five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth, making it the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected....

The study, which was published in the journal Ecosphere, involved scientists who analyzed fire severity data from the U.S. Forest Service and Google Earth Engine. The analysis was conducted across seven major forest types. They found that in low- and middle-elevation forest types, the average annual area that burned at low-to-moderate severity has decreased from more than 90 percent before 1850 to 60-70 percent today. At the same time, the area burned annually at high severity has nearly quintupled, rising from less than 10% to 43% today....

The nation’s scientific community also faces another obstacle: convincing the public that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe, and how important it is to get a COVID-19 vaccination in the first place. “Even the most effective vaccine can’t protect us or our loved ones if people are afraid to take it or will not take it,” said Kathleen Mullane, director of infectious disease clinical trials at University of Chicago Medicine. “We know things are moving faster than ever, but the nation’s scientific community has cooperated and collaborated in ways as never before and we are absolutely committed to making sure whatever is ultimately approved works and is safe....

New work on linear-probing hash tables from MIT CSAIL could lead to more efficient data storage and retrieval in computers. A trio of researchers that includes William Kuszmaul — a computer science PhD student at MIT — has made a discovery that could lead to more efficient data storage and retrieval in computers. The team’s findings relate to so-called “linear-probing hash tables,” which were introduced in 1954 and are among the oldest, simplest, and fastest data structures available today....

If you cleared fallen leaves from your lawn last fall, did you deposit them along the edge of your lawn, where grass meets woods? If you did, you might have unwittingly created an ideal habitat for blacklegged ticks. In areas of the United States where ticks that carry Lyme disease-causing bacteria are prevalent, residential properties often intermingle with forested areas, and ticks thrive in the “edge habitats” where lawn and woods meet....

“I want to make a case for why this area should be protected, and I can tell that story using fish,” says Dr. Lesley de Souza, a conservation ecologist at the Field Museum. “We found over 450 species of fish in an area smaller than Connecticut. The entire Mississippi River basin has fewer than 200 species. We’re talking about a pretty small area that has a ton of diversity.” In this study, de Souza focused on the lakes, rivers, and streams in the Rupununi region of central Guyana in northeastern South America....

New research published in the British Journal of Pharmacology indicates that two currently available medications — an antifungal drug and an antidepressant — can effectively inhibit the virus that causes COVID-19 in laboratory cells. Investigators found that the antifungal itraconazole and the antidepressant fluoxetine each blocked the production of infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus in cell culture lab tests. When either drug was used in combination with the antiviral drug remdesiver, the combination showed synergistic effects and inhibited the production of SARS-CoV-2 by more than 90%....

Amid all of the efforts to convert the nation’s energy supply to renewable sources, solar power still accounts for a little less than 3% of electricity generated in the U.S. In part, that’s because of the relatively high cost to produce solar cells. One way to lower the cost of production would be to develop solar cells that use less-expensive materials than today’s silicon-based models. To achieve that, some engineers have zeroed in on halide perovskite, a type of human-made material with repeating crystals shaped like cubes....

“This is interesting because such vortices are a clear indication of the frictionless flow of a quantum gas — the so-called superfluidity,” says Francesca Ferlaino from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Ferlaino and her team are researching quantum gases made of strongly magnetic elements. For such dipolar quantum gases, in which atoms are highly connected to each other, quantum vortices could not be demonstrated so far....

A team of researchers led by Rice University has achieved a new benchmark in the design of atomically thin solar cells made of semiconducting perovskites, boosting their efficiency while retaining their ability to stand up to the environment. Rice’s Aditya Mohite and his colleagues discovered that sunlight itself contracts the space between atomic layers in 2D perovskites enough to improve the material’s photovoltaic efficiency by up to 18%, an astounding leap in a field where progress is often measured in fractions of a percent....

Hubble had a ringside seat to the demolition derby. It fired off a series of snapshots over several days capturing the outflow of tons of dusty debris from the 13,000 miles-per-hour impact. Astronomers didn’t know what to expect. They were surprised, delighted, and somewhat mystified by the results. The dust blew off the asteroid into a cone shape, got twisted up along the asteroid’s orbit about its companion, and was then blown into a comet-like tail....

Researchers at Aalto University have developed a new device for spintronics. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications, and mark a step towards the goal of using spintronics to make computer chips and devices for data processing and communication technology that are small and powerful. Traditional electronics uses electrical charge to carry out computations that power most of our day-to-day technology. However, engineers are unable to make electronics do calculations faster, as moving charge creates heat, and we’re at the limits of how small and fast chips can get before overheating....

Most stars, including the Sun, will become “white dwarfs” after they begin to run out of fuel, expand and cool into a red giant, and then lose their outer layers. This evolution leaves behind a stellar nub that slowly fades for billions of years. A team of scientists used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton to investigate some unusual X-ray activity in three white dwarf stars. Typically, white dwarfs give off low-energy X-rays, which researchers saw in their sample....

The UVES instrument shows the light from quasar HE0940-1050 after it has traveled through the intergalactic medium. The most massive galaxies in the Universe host supermassive black holes at their centers. These truly colossal black holes chew up surrounding material at astonishing rates, expelling huge amounts of radiation as they do so and glowing as some of the brightest objects in the known Universe! Despite their incredible distances from Earth, the regions surrounding these black holes shine so brightly that their appearance is similar to that of stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way....

In a paper published online in the Journal of Cleaner Production, the researchers report that, by replacing a certain percentage of traditional cement with volcanic ash, they can reduce a concrete structure’s “embodied energy,” or the total energy that goes into making concrete. According to their calculations, it takes 16 percent less energy to construct a pilot neighborhood with 26 concrete buildings made with 50 percent volcanic ash, compared with the energy it takes to make the same structures entirely of traditional Portland cement....

Make-up products used every day by millions of people in the UK are contaminated with potentially deadly bugs, such as E.coli and Staphylococci, because most are not being cleaned and are used far beyond their expiry dates, new research led by Dr. Amreen Bashir and Professor Peter Lambert of Aston University’s School of Life and Health Sciences has shown. Dr. Amreen Bashir explains what she found in your make-up bags and gives her top tips for cleaning your make-up products....

Cerebral edema, swelling that occurs in the brain, is a severe and potentially fatal complication of stroke. New research, which was conducted in mice and appears in the journal Science, shows for the first time that the glymphatic system — normally associated with the beneficial task of waste removal — goes awry during a stroke and floods the brain, triggering edema and drowning brain cells. “These findings show that the glymphatic system plays a central role in driving the acute tissue swelling in the brain after a stroke,” said Maiken Nedergaard, M....

A University of Arizona-led team of astronomers has created a detailed, three-dimensional image of a dying hypergiant star. The team, led by UArizona researchers Ambesh Singh and Lucy Ziurys, traced the distribution, directions, and velocities of a variety of molecules surrounding a red hypergiant star known as VY Canis Majoris. Their findings, which they presented on June 13, 2022, at the 240th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California, offer insights, at an unprecedented scale, into the processes that accompany the death of giant stars....