Galaxies Develop Bar-shaped Arms in Time
	Barred galaxies, having two arms trailing each other on either side of the galactic center, might have evolved in this particular shape with the passing of time, say astronomers who discovered that, compared to the first half of the universe's past, currently there are three times more galaxies that have bars. Models indicate that the bar takes shape as stars inside the disk orbiting the center of the galaxy can no longer maintain a c ... [read more >>]
	30 July 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gravity Tractors Could Keep Threatening Asteroids Away
	If an asteroid were to be discovered tomorrow and proven that it would impact the Earth in less than a week, we wouldn't be able to do much to prevent this from happening. All we can do so far is hope that such events do not occur any time soon. Deflecting asteroids from a possible Earth-threatening trajectory may sound like an easy task, but in fact it is anything but that. Fortunately, there are some ideas that could actually wo ... [read more >>]
	29 July 2008, 09:40GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Most Comets Could Be Fragments of Larger Objects
	There are numerous comets orbiting through the inner solar system, but where this huge amount of objects comes from is largely unknown. Now astronomers have suggested that many short orbit comets could in fact be fragments of much larger objects that break up into multiple pieces as they enter the inner solar system and interact gravitationally with the planets. Short-period comets originate in the Kuiper belt of objects locat ... [read more >>]
	28 July 2008, 06:05GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Stellar Cradle Discovered Near Galaxy's Black Hole
	The worst place where a star could grow is in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, as powerful gravitational fields exerted by the latter prevent the clouds of gas to condense into objects such as our Sun. However, astronomers have recently discovered that young stars do form near the center of our galaxy, inside a ring-shaped cloud of gas thought to surround the Milky Way's black hole, Sagittarius A*. This region of space, s ... [read more >>]
	24 July 2008, 04:15GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Asteroids Could Be Fractured by Sunlight
	It's not often that astronomers find asteroids made out of a single massive piece, but rather containing two or more objects loosely bound together or orbiting each other, tumbling through the immensity of space. The cause to this particularity remained a subject of debate for a long time, although now a new study proposes that energy emitted from the Sun could force the asteroid into a spin which will eventually determine it to split ... [read more >>]
	10 July 2008, 05:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Einstein Proven Correct Once Again
	By making observations on a binary system of pulsars a team of researchers from the McGill University in Montreal measured for the first time the spin precession of a celestial body located outside the solar system. Pulsars are a type of neutron stars with strong magnetic fields, emitting electromagnetic radiation through the poles. Most of the time they are found in systems, orbiting other companions and because they also have strong grav ... [read more >>]
	04 July 2008, 04:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Future Space Mission Could Study the Weird Space Surrounding Black Holes
	Black holes produce gravitational fields so powerful that they are able to shape space-time around them. However, what shape that particular volume of space surrounding the black hole might take under the influence of such an extreme gravitational field is unknown, as are the effects that might produce the powerful magnetic field generated by a magnetar. Imaging the gravitational or magnetic field of such objects is basically impossible, n ... [read more >>]
	02 July 2008, 05:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Would Antimatter Interact with Gravity?
	The exact opposite of matter, antimatter, has been known to exist for decades now, although how it behaves in the presence of a gravitational field remains mostly unknown even though countless experiments have been conducted over the years. Each particle described in the Standard Model has its own antiparticle counterpart, having similar mass and spin, albeit opposite charge. For example, the electron has as antiparticle the positron, whic ... [read more >>]
	12 June 2008, 06:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cause for Astronauts' Space Sickness Found
	Space sickness, or the Space Adaptation Syndrome, is experienced by astronauts while transitioning from a gravitational field to another, such as during space travel. Although it only lasts for the first few days of the space trip, space sickness can also affect experienced astronauts even after a long period of time. According to statistics, almost half of all the astronauts who flew into space felt the effects of space sickness. [ADMA ... [read more >>]
	23 May 2008, 04:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Theory Could Explain the Information Paradox
	In the 1970s Stephen Hawking showed that singularities, and therefore black holes, can exist in our space-time continuum. He also revealed that although black holes radiate mass and energy in the surrounding medium through the event horizon, information falling into a black hole would be lost forever, meaning that matter falling into a black hole and emerging later through the event horizon cannot be identified as being one and the same. ... [read more >>]
	15 May 2008, 04:38GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Lunar Dust Could Affect Astronauts' Health
	Lunar dust is now probably one of the biggest issues considered in the event of a future manned mission to the surface of the Moon. It is a highly abrasive fine powder covering the whole surface of the Moon, it can easily get stuck to equipment and spacesuits and it can even get into tight spaces, such as joints, and interfere with their proper operation. But how harmful is it for astronauts? In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the A ... [read more >>]
	14 May 2008, 04:44GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Holes Are Not Black
	Theory says that black holes are objects of extreme mass and density, having powerful gravitational fields able to warp space and time, and surrounded by a boundary called the event horizon, beyond which matter and energy cannot escape the gravitational pull and will ultimately fall in the singularity. In addition to this, in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking stated that black holes were not entirely black, meaning that they did emit some form of ... [read more >>]
	13 May 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dust Devils are No Threat to Phoenix Lander
	NASA's Phoenix Mars lander is expected to touchdown on the Red Planet on May 25 in a north polar region known as "Green Valley". In anticipation for the event, NASA has been using its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to make periodical observations of the designated landing spot and on April 20, the MRO spotted two dust vortices – often called dust devils – towering one kilometer high into the Martian atmosphere, sweeping across ... [read more >>]
	08 May 2008, 04:10GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Magnetic Fields Could Help Spacecrafts Fly in Formation
	Many space missions today cannot be carried out mostly because the involved spacecrafts would have to fly in a precise formation, such as NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission or the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which is supposed to detect distortions in the matter of space-time known as gravitational waves. The problem is that in order for a fleet of spacecrafts to keep in formation, they would have to be positioned with th ... [read more >>]
	07 May 2008, 03:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Happy Birthday Hubble
	The Hubble Space Telescope, currently operated by the NASA/ESA collaboration, celebrates 18 years since it was launched into space. In order to mark this moment, the Hubble collaboration is now launching the vastest amount of individual images ever released at once for public use – 59 new images – presenting dramatic galactic collisions, observed throughout the universe. Colliding galaxies often spell disaster for star systems, albeit they ... [read more >>]
	24 April 2008, 10:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Unveil the Workings of Supermassive Black Hole Particle Jets
	Supermassive black holes are mostly found in galactic nuclei, ejecting matter in the form of particle jets at relativistic speeds during the 'feeding' process. According to theory, these particle jets are accelerated to these speeds by tightly-twisted magnetic fields generated in the close proximity of the black hole. However, confirming this theory has proved rather problematic until now. National Ratio Astronomy Obser ... [read more >>]
	24 April 2008, 02:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dark Matter Particles May Have Been Discovered
	DAMA, or the Dark Matter collaboration, has just finished its four-year second phase of its experiments and claims to have strong evidence of observing dark matter particles. The same Italian and Chinese collaboration claimed to have had clear evidence of dark matter existence ever since 2003, although other physicists believe the results to be only a statistical anomaly. "We are pretty sure now that this signal is not a statistic ... [read more >>]
	17 April 2008, 11:10GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Quasar Confirms General Relativity Prediction
	The Theory of General Relativity predicts that objects of great mass – such as stars, neutron stars, black holes and so on – have the ability of severely warping the fabric of space-time due to their powerful gravitational pull. The prediction was first verified in 1919, when Arthur Eddington allegedly detected such warps in the fabric of the universe on the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. Now, researchers claim to have ev ... [read more >>]
	17 April 2008, 02:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dark Matter Lost Once Again
	Dark matter is believed to be responsible for more than 70 percent of the total mass of the universe, however somehow we can't find any, even while regular matter represents only 4 percent of the total mass. This means only two things: either dark matter presents weak interactions towards ordinary matter or dark matter doesn't exist at all. Right now researchers from the St Andrews University are more inclined to take into consid ... [read more >>]
	07 April 2008, 10:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

LIGO Detector to Receive Upgrade
	In August 2002, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, became operational and started looking for the elusive gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein. It collected a massive amount of data, probably including some gravitational waves, however when scientists were put to the daunting task of filtering that data, they realized it was close to impossible. Basically, they cannot say whether they have detecte ... [read more >>]
	03 April 2008, 07:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Planet in the Making
	At this moment there are 277 planets known to exist outside our solar system, most of which are either gas giants or too inhospitable for life. A very little number of these exoplanets have rocky surfaces or bear a small resemblance to our planet. Astronomers from the University of St Andrews in collaboration with colleagues from the US reveal that they have discovered a planet into its early formation stage, still surrounded by a cloud of ... [read more >>]
	03 April 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Fartherst Galaxy Cluster Discovered - 11.4 Billion Light-Years Away
	LBG-2377 is a galaxy proto-cluster located 11.4 billion light years away from Earth – the most distant galaxies ever observed. In fact, these galaxies are so far away from us, that they appear as they looked when they were in the first days of their lives. Previously, the most distant such galaxy proto-cluster was located only 9 billion light years away from Earth. "When you observe this far away, you are actually seeing the unive ... [read more >>]
	01 April 2008, 03:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Yes, Boomerangs Return Even in Space
	If you are asking yourself the same question that Yasuhiro Togai posed a couple of years ago, then you should probably know that the answer is 'Yes! Boomerangs can fly in space just as well as they do back here on Earth.' Yasuhiro Togai is a Japanese world boomerang champion, and just before the space shuttle Endeavor launched into space on March 11, Togai asked his compatriot astronaut Takao Doi to conduct an unprecedented exper ... [read more >>]
	21 March 2008, 10:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Soda Might Have Powered Geysers on Mars
	On Earth, there are two distinct ways through which water may erupt from beneath the surface into columns stretching as high as 45 meters or more. The first is by pushing water up into the air with steam coming from the deep underground. The second uses the force provided by carbon dioxide gas making its way to the surface. Scientists say that Mars could have had such geysers back in its past, however they must have been much more spectacu ... [read more >>]
	18 March 2008, 11:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

iPod in Space
	Wow. This guy must have 30-40 vision to spot that iPod while glancing over some hi-res photos of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The space shuttle is currently on low-Earth orbit, docked to the International Space Station, meaning that the iPod is still there. The news comes courtesy of TUAW reader Walter who has spott ... [read more >>]
	17 March 2008, 12:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Large Dark Matter Cloud, Biggest Found Yet
	If it were visible from the Earth with the naked eye, it would appear as a structure eight times bigger than the apparent size of the Moon! Measuring more than 270 million light-years across, the newly discovered cloud is the largest structure of dark matter ever observed. The discovery was made by an astronomer from the University of British Columbia, namely assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy Ludovic Van Waerbe ... [read more >>]
	17 March 2008, 11:59GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Universe Is Filled with Gravitational Lenses
	"Leave your telescopes at home, we won't need them for the next observation," would probably say Einstein. Indeed, the universe is dominated on the large scale by this mysterious force we call gravity, but it is not only responsible for keeping the universe from falling apart. Gravitational lensing, for example, is another of the many effects determined by gravity. It was predicted by famous German physicist Albert Einstein ... [read more >>]
	04 March 2008, 10:07GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Hole Collisions Revealed by Infrared Glows
	Behemoths up to a billion times the mass of our Sun lie in our universe, swallowing up matter to hide it forever from the eyes of any outside observers. Not even light can escape their massive gravitational pull, that's why they are called black holes; they do not emit any form of electromagnetic radiation, thus no light. This is the biggest problem in the study of black holes, we as humans depend in a great proportion on observations ... [read more >>]
	04 March 2008, 09:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Darkness Within Light
	How can something exist in two distinct forms at the same time? Physics clearly states that light experiences particle-wave duality, while common sense tells us this is impossible. However, all objects no matter how massive behave in a particle-wave manner. And why is the speed of light the maximum possible speed in the universe? Light is still hiding great mysteries even today. A similar weird behavior experienced by light is a property r ... [read more >>]
	27 February 2008, 08:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

VLT Reveals New Cosmic Interactions
	ESA's Very Large Telescope surprised what seems to be a group of three large galaxies engaged into gravitational interactions with each other. The system lies 106 million light years away, in the direction of the Piscis Austrinus constellation, and is formed of NGC 7173, NGC 7174 and NGC 7176. Two of the galaxies, respectively NGC 7173 and NGC 7176, are elliptical galaxies, while the other one is a spiral galaxy relative ... [read more >>]
	14 February 2008, 10:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Stop Blasting the Moon, Scientists Say!
	The Moon's gravity is one sixth of that on the surface of the Earth, meaning that lunar landers do not require a great deal of thrust in order to decelerate and land relatively gently on its surface, but what seem like gentle touchdowns to us here on Earth, on the Moon such events can get relatively violent. Like the landings of the Apollo Lunar Modules between 1969 to 1972. As they slowly approached the lunar surface, high veloci ... [read more >>]
	13 February 2008, 10:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Reveal More of Mercury's Secrets
	New observations on one of the most mysterious planets in the solar system suggest that Mercury has a comet-like tail. However, while the cometary tails are relatively bright and often visible with the naked eye from the surface of the Earth, Mercury's tail is less visible in the visible spectrum. Previous observations conducted in the middle of 2006 showed that the smallest planet in the solar system presents a tail of sodi ... [read more >>]
	06 February 2008, 05:14GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Tiny Black Holes May Open the Door to Extra Dimensions
	As they travel through space, black holes often bursts off radiation and cosmic flares, which, according to Virginia Tech Blacksburg researchers, could provide yet again with evidence that extra spatial dimensions exist. In the 1970s, British physicist Stephen Hawking revealed a solution to black holes, predicting that, given enough time, they would evaporate completely through a quantum process, called 'Hawking radiation� ... [read more >>]
	06 February 2008, 02:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NGC 1132: Single Galaxy or Massive Merger?
	Located more than 320 million light years away, in the Eridanus constellation, the galaxy NGC 1132 represents a class of giant elliptical galaxies, surrounded by a group of dwarf galaxies named by astronomers, the 'fossil group.' The shear size of the elliptical galaxy in relation to its much smaller companions suggests that it could have formed through the collision of a large number of galaxies in the recent past. It sits ... [read more >>]
	05 February 2008, 10:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Invents the Vertical Treadmill
	Extreme sports fanatics would really enjoy this new invention, as it turns a horizontally-standing running treadmill into a vertical one, or even a sideways one. Workouts will never be the same! Don't get to excited though, I don't think you will find this baby in any gyms any time soon. NASA has been developing the vertical treadmill, in order to solve one of the biggest problems related to weightlessness, while astronauts condu ... [read more >>]
	04 February 2008, 10:18GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Finding the Shapes of Alternative Spatial Dimensions
	We can normally see or experience only four of the dimensions of the universe, three spatial dimensions and a temporal one, but can we be certain that there aren't any others? Ever since it was first constructed, the string theory model of the universe seemed to suggest that the world we live in cannot possibly exist in a four dimensional universe, thus theorists working on it started adding more and more spacial dimensions. ... [read more >>]
	01 February 2008, 04:12GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dark Matter and Dark Energy One and the Same?
	Either it is exerting an extra gravitational pull on the galaxies or is driving the expansion of the universe, dark matter and dark energy remain mostly mysterious even today. Astrophysicists say that the matter distribution in the universe points towards a concentration of 4 percent of regular matter while the remnant mass is represented by dark matter and dark energy. On the other hand, astronomers from the University of St And ... [read more >>]
	01 February 2008, 03:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Will We Ever be Able to Travel to Parallel Universes?
	Wormholes, time travel, white holes, extra spacial dimensions, parallel universes - all arose as solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity, meaning theoretical physics predicts they should all be likely to exist in the fabric of space-time. But will we ever be able to open a wormhole into space-time to travel towards a parallel universe, and how would we even know if we did? Russian physicist Alexander Shatskiy ... [read more >>]
	31 January 2008, 04:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Who's Pushing and Who's Pulling?
	Is the expansion of the universe triggered by the repulsion force of dark matter or by the pulling action of a mysterious massive force originating in the outer boundaries of the universe? Such information is currently unavailable, but one thing is for certain: gravity is not enough to keep the galaxies and galaxy clusters together in the distant future, meaning that the very likely fate of the universe is that it will end in a B ... [read more >>]
	31 January 2008, 03:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Rogue Speeding Star Comes from LMC, Scientists Say
	In 2005, astronomers discovered a star traveling away from the Milky Way at hypervelocities, thus they argued that it must have somehow been ejected from the central regions of the galaxy during interactions with the supermassive black hole. However, HE 0437-5439 posed a great mystery. How could a 35-million-year-old star travel a distance that would usually take at least 100 million years to complete at the current speed of the star? ... [read more >>]
	28 January 2008, 11:08GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Where Is Higgs Boson?
	Quantum physicists think they know the answer. Probabilistic calculations reveal than the data provided by previous experiments has been miscalculated and that the Higgs boson has in fact been discovered. Weird! The Higgs boson is the only particle predicted by the Standard Model that hasn't been discovered yet. It is thought to be responsible for giving other elementary particles mass, and might explain why the photon has n ... [read more >>]
	24 January 2008, 04:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

CMS Is Finally Completed
	Yet another step in the completion of the Large Hadron Collider was taken yesterday morning, as the final element of the Compact Muon Solenoid was lowered nearly 100 meters bellow ground. After more than eight years of work at the world's most powerful particle accelerator, scientists hope that they will be able to start initial experiments with the LHC until the end of this year. The CMS will be able to detect high-energy proton-prot ... [read more >>]
	23 January 2008, 08:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Future Astronaut Coffee Cups Have Corkscrew Shape
	Ever wondered how future astronauts will drink their coffees when they wake up? Don't say they will use cups, because they have already tried that and its not very funny to get hot coffee all over your face. On Earth, the powerful gravitational field solves pretty much of this problem. Liquids are contained into cups and kept there by the gravitational force, which also helps us while trying to pour it into another cup. But ... [read more >>]
	21 January 2008, 04:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Universe Might Be Hanging on a String
	String theory predicts that the universe could be populated with entities of pure mass-energy called cosmic strings, which are basically defects in the space-time fabric that are create while spacetime suffers a rapid change in phase. Such changes in phase might have taken place in the early stages of the universe, during the Big Bang. String theory abandons the classical belief that elementary particles are point-like object ... [read more >>]
	19 January 2008, 05:34GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Don't Just Sit, Hoverit!
	It's finally out on the market. Behold the hovering chair! We can at last literally float the stress away in the new unique suspended lounger. In fact that's its name, "The Lounger". The British company Hoverit Ltd. has recently presented a chair that can act as a bed as well, which defies gravity by floating on a set of permanent magnets, just a few centimeters above the surface of the ground. The company ... [read more >>]
	18 January 2008, 02:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Closer Look Into Milky Way's Black Hole
	All known spiral galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center and our Milky Way is no different. However, observing a black hole is rather a difficult task, especially when it is situated in regions of space populated by large amounts of matter such as those in the galactic nuclei of active galaxies. The best observation ever of the Milky Way's black hole was conducted by observing the effects produced on the mater ... [read more >>]
	17 January 2008, 02:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Ice Age Online Announced!
	20th Century Fox will step into the MMO games big time with Ice Age Online, based on the movie series and a sure blockbuster if done right. And there is no reason for it to be done wrong, since the development work will be handled by Ragnarok Online and Rose Online Creat ... [read more >>]
	16 January 2008, 07:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Photons Could Orbit Black Holes
	Black holes have such extreme gravitational fields that anything falling beyond the event horizon is ultimately destined to hit the point-like singularity, where it will probably remain forever. Believe it or not, but stable orbits around black holes are possible. Just because an object has extreme gravitational fields, it does not necessarily mean that matter in its close vicinity will fall towards it, thus approaching the black ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 04:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Massive Neutron Stars vs. Black Holes
	The universe is practically littered with corpses of dead stars, or at least the visible part of the universe is. In fact, most of the matter forming the Earth comes from the bodies of one or more stars that shed part of their material at the end of their lives. However, not all the stars come to share the same fate. Many of the more massive stars turn into neutron stars or black holes during the process of supernova explosion. ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 02:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Milky Way Will Soon Collide with Massive Gas Cloud!
	So I was watching the news bulletin the other day and I heard some of the most outrageous news ever! They were saying something like: 'A giant black hole will swallow the whole Milky Way!' I calmly turned off the TV-set and went to work, searching the Internet for information regarding the elusive black hole, but failed to find any. I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow, that TV station must have some really good astrophysicis ... [read more >>]
	12 January 2008, 04:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia