Technology

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the long-suspected underlying population of galaxies, which produced the bulk of new stars during the universe’s early years.

Abell 2744 has the smallest, faintest, and most numerous galaxies ever seen in the remote universe, captured by Hubble deep exposures taken in ultraviolet light.

The 58 young, diminutive galaxies spied by Hubble were photographed as they appeared more than 10 billion years ago, during the heyday of star birth.

Scientists have come across a new planet, considered Earth’s ‘twin’, in another solar system that is located 200 light years away.

The planet, KOI-314c, is 60 percent larger than Earth but has the same weight.

It is also much hotter than Earth, with scientists saying that its surface temperatures would be around 104 degree Celsius.

KOI-314c is suspected to have a gaseous atmosphere, making the planet just 30 per cent denser than water, Sky News reported.

That a species of cockroach found only in text books has made an appearance after a 49-million-year hiatus can actually make the skin of the strongest man crawl!

Uprooting earlier theories, a shocking discovery has found the cockroach in the genus Ectobius back in motion.

It was the most common cockroach inhabiting a large region, from northernmost Europe to southernmost Africa till 49 million years ago.

The bitter chill gripping North America is a result of Arctic air that has spilled southwards, and global warming may be a cause, an expert said on Monday.

Arctic air is normally penned in at the roof of the world by a powerful circular wind called the polar vortex, said Dim Coumou, a senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) near Berlin.

When the vortex weakens, the air starts heading southwards, bringing exceptional snow and chill to middle latitudes.

New study in fossils from Belgium has shed light on the origin of some of the most well-known, and well-loved, modern mammals.

The study has traced the ancestry of cats and dogs, as well as other carnivorous mammals, taxonomically called ‘carnivoraformes’ to primitive carnivorous mammals dating back to 55 million years ago, which is the beginning of the time period called the Eocene.

Scientists have developed a semi-analytical model, which could help resolve the puzzling formation of this exotic triple-star system.

Astrophysicist Thomas Tauris from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and the Argelander Institute for Astronomy in Bonn jointly with Ed van den Heuvel through theoretical calculations and stability analysis on the base of stellar evolution, demonstrated a plausible theoretical model which brings new insight to knowledge of stellar interactions in multiple star systems.

What do tea, turmeric and broccoli have in common? A lot, when it comes to an arsenal of certain chemicals found in them, called phytochemicals, that can be harnessed to combat cancer therapy side-effects in synergy with conventional anti-cancer drugs.

Chemotherapy is fraught with side-effects. Now Indian scientists have shown how certain naturally-occurring plant chemicals when used in combination with routine cancer drugs can actually lower the dosage of the medication, thereby minimising the after-effects.

The quest to find more planets resembling earth has got a boost with the discovery of the first earth-mass planet.

The planet, called KOI-314c, weighs the same as earth but it is 60 percent larger in diameter, meaning that it must have a very thick, gaseous atmosphere, said a study.

“This planet might have the same mass as earth but it is certainly not earth-like,” said David Kipping of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA).

Researchers have discovered a 100-million-year old piece of amber which reveals the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant- a cluster of 18 tiny flowers from the Cretaceous Period.

It was found that one of them in the process of making some new seeds for the next generation.

Researchers recently discovered four ancient Ectobius species in the 49-million-year-old Green River Formation near Rifle, Colorado in deposits that are about five million years older than the Baltic amber.

However, these cockroaches soon became extinct in North America. The cause for the extinction of Ectobius in North America in the dim past is unknown, but it evidently survived in the Old World, and western Europe in particular.

Astronomers have discovered a unique triple star system which could reveal the true nature of gravity.

US astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) found the stellar system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense neutron star, all packed within a space smaller than Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

The closeness of the stars, combined with their nature, has allowed scientists to make the best measurements yet of the complex gravitational interactions in such a system.

This could very well end the suspense over the hypothetical presence of a halo, or ring, surrounding our Earth.

In a major breakthrough, a GPS (Global Positioning System) expert has discovered more grounds to believe that the Earth can indeed be surrounded by an invisible halo of dark matter – the stuff that possesses mass and yet can’t be seen.

In ground breaking work, researchers have unearthed why small and giant volcanoes have different frequency and magnitude while erupting.

Experts from the universities of Geneva, Bristol and Savoie carried out over 1.2 million simulations to establish the conditions in which volcanic eruptions of different sizes occur.

Small, frequent eruptions are known to be triggered by a process called magma replenishment, which stresses the walls around a magma chamber to breaking point.

Researchers have suggested that the risk of eruption of a “supervolcano”, hundreds times more powerful than conventional volcanoes -have potential to wipe out civilization – is more likely than believed earlier.

By effectively “exploding” as opposed to erupting, supervolcanos leave a giant hole in the Earth’s crust – a caldera, that can be up to one hundred kilometres in diameter.

A supervolcano’s magma chamber can be several kilometres thick and up to one hundred kilometres wide, which makes it far too big to sustain sufficient overpressure through magma recharge.