Daniel Clery

4 weeks ago | science.org | Daniel Clery

Researchers have found promising hints that the atmosphere of a distant planet contains gases linked to life, BBC reports today. A team led by University of Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan reports in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that it used NASA’s JWST telescope to detect the signatures of the gases dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in starlight that had passed through the atmosphere of K2-18b, a massive planet 120 light-years from Earth.

1 month ago | science.org | Daniel Clery

A dark horse reactor design has emerged as a contender in the race to develop a commercial fusion reactor. Doughnut-shaped machines called tokamaks have long been the favorites of scientists hoping to fuse atoms to generate energy. Their twistier cousins, stellarators, had gotten less attention—and funding—because they didn’t perform as well and their complex geometries are harder to design and build. But stellarators have properties that could, in the long run, make them better as power plants.

1 month ago | science.org | Daniel Clery

Dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe, may not have always provided a steady push as cosmologists have assumed for decades. Instead, the latest data from the powerful Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) add more evidence that the universe’s expansion accelerated faster in the past than it is doing now.

1 month ago | science.org | Daniel Clery

Dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe, may not have always provided a steady push as cosmologists have assumed for decades. Instead, the latest data from the powerful Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) add more evidence that the universe’s expansion accelerated faster in the past than it is doing now.

1 month ago | science.org | Daniel Clery

A strange-looking telescope that scanned the skies from a perch in northern Chile for 15 years has released its final data set: detailed maps of the infant universe showing the roiling clouds of hydrogen and helium gas that would one day coalesce into the stars and galaxies we see today.