Nature Hub

    From- Sky & Tescope,   By  - Bob King,     Edited by - Amal Udawatta    Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks has awakened again from its recent slumbers with a fresh outburst. It’s now bright enough to see in a modest telescope. Taken on October 5th, this photo matches the comet's visual appearance with a strongly-condensed inner coma surrounded by a somewhat larger and considerably fainter outer coma. A faint tail trails off to the northeast. Eliot Herman    Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks has awakened again from its recent slumbers with a fresh outburst. It’s now bright enough to see in a modest telescope. Periodic Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks remains in character as it heads toward perihelion next April. Famous for its unpredictable outbursts during previous appearances, it blew up again around October 5.2 UT, waxing nearly 100 times brighter (nearly 5 magnitudes!) compared to the night prior. Had you sought the comet on October 3rd, you might have look...

  From - Sky & Tlescope,   By - Monica Young,   Edited by - Amal Udawatta, This artist’s concept shows the hot, molten moon emerging from a synestia, a giant spinning donut of vaporized rock that formed when planet-sized objects collided. The synestia is in the process of condensing to form the Earth. The illustration of the synestia is based on a NASA artist's rendering of a protoplanetary disk. Sarah Stewart    A star’s sudden brightening and, two years later, its sudden dimming point to a cataclysmic collision between two large worlds. Astronomers have caught two infant worlds slamming together around a young, Sun-like star more than 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Puppis. The impact probably vaporized both planets, creating a huge cloud of debris that still orbits the host star. Ultimately, the vaporized material will settle to form a new, much larger world — and astronomers are watching it all as it happens. The planetary collision prov...

    From - Knowable Magazine,   By -   By - Elise Cutts,   Edited by  Amal Udawatta, Twitte      In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in the search for alien life. The finding follows similar news regarding neighboring planet TRAPPIST-1 B, another planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Its dim, red star hosts seven rocky worlds, a few of which are in the habitable zone — at a distance from their star at which liquid water could exist on their surfaces and otherworldly life might thrive. What it would take to detect that life, if it exists, isn’t a new question. But thanks to the JWST, it’s finally becoming a practical one. In the next few years, the telescope could glimpse the atmospheres of several promising planets orbiting distant stars. Hidden away in t...

    From - NPR Magazine,     By - Nathan Root,     Edited by - Amal Udawatta, A study published in the journal  Nature  found that the status of amphibians globally is "deteriorating rapidly," earning them the unenviable title of being the planet's most threatened class of vertebrates. Here, an endangered Agalychnis annae, commonly known as a Blue-Sided Leaf Frog, is seen at National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica, INBio, in Heredia, Costa Rica. Kent Gilbert/AP When JJ Apodaca was starting graduate school for biology in 2004, a first-of-its-kind study had just been released assessing the status of the world's least understood vertebrates. The first Global Amphibian Assessment, which looked at more than 5,700 species of frogs, toads, salamanders, newts and other amphibians became "pretty much the guiding light of my career," said Apodaca, who now heads the nonprofit group Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. Nineteen years later, a  second...

 From - Knowable Magazine  By -  Dan Falk,  Edited by - Amal Udawatta, At the heart of the Big Bang model of cosmic origins is the observation that the universe is expanding, something astronomers have known for nearly a century. And yet, determining just how fast the universe is expanding has been frustratingly difficult to accomplish. In fact, it’s worse than that: Using one type of measurement, based on the cosmic microwave background — radiation left over from the Big Bang — astronomers find one value for the universe’s expansion rate. A different type of measurement, based on observations of light from exploding stars called supernovas, yields another value. And the two numbers disagree. As those measurements get more and more precise, that disagreement becomes harder and harder to explain. In recent years, the discrepancy has even been given a name — the “ Hubble tension ” — after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, one of the first to propose that the universe i...