Michelle Starr

1 week ago | sciencealert.com | Michelle Starr

A new analysis of the sky has finally confirmed where the missing half of the Universe's visible matter has been hiding. In the space around galaxies, it lurks as huge, invisible clouds of ionized hydrogen. Normally, this would be impossible to see – but a large international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has developed a technique that reveals its hiding places, out there in the darkness amidst the stars.

1 week ago | sciencealert.com | Michelle Starr

A surprise discovery in Gale Crater is the component that was missing in the puzzle of Mars's climate history. There, embedded in the bedrock, the Curiosity rover has identified a mineral called siderite that can only have formed from the precipitation of carbon from the Martian atmosphere. In other words, billions of years ago, Mars had an active carbon cycle.

1 week ago | yahoo.com | Michelle Starr

A surprise discovery in Gale Crater is the component that was missing in the puzzle of Mars's climate history. There, embedded in the bedrock, the Curiosity rover has identified a mineral called siderite that can only have formed from the precipitation of carbon from the Martian atmosphere. In other words, billions of years ago, Mars had an active carbon cycle.

1 week ago | sciencealert.com | Michelle Starr

Back when the Universe was new, following the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, galaxies took a bit of time to assemble themselves from the surrounding primordial soup. A new discovery right at the end of the Cosmic Dawn is challenging how long we thought that assembly took. JWST has spotted a huge, ultramassive galaxy as it appeared 12.8 billion years ago, so intricately structured that it can only belong to the most spectacular category of galaxies: the grand design spiral.

1 week ago | sciencealert.com | Michelle Starr

A collection of objects just 120 light-years away is a truly gob-smacking, one-of-a-kind system. It consists of two brown dwarfs locked in a configuration known as an eclipsing binary, with a smaller exoplanet in its own orbit around both. What makes the system even more special is that the exoplanet orbits on a perpendicular plane, around the brown dwarfs' poles.