04.03.2017 Viewed: 114

04.03.2017 Viewed: 95

Lego announced on Tuesday (Feb. 28) that it would be making a fan-created set called "Women of NASA," featuring five important women who have worked for the agency.

04.03.2017 Viewed: 113

03.03.2017 Viewed: 80

03.03.2017 Viewed: 120

The discovery of a new and rarely seen nebula 10 billion light-years away has created a cosmic mystery: What is lighting up this dusty cloud of gases?

Researchers led by Zheng Cai, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered an "enormous Lyman-alpha nebula," or ELAN, only the third of these vast cosmic structures ever seen. A nebula is an interstellar cloud of gases and dust; an ELAN is a special kind of nebula, so named because it emits Lyman-alpha radiation — a particular wavelength of light emitted when the electron in a hydrogen atom drops down to its lowest energy level.

The two other ELANS previously discovered are nicknamed the Slug Nebula (for UC Santa Cruz's idiosyncratic mascot) and the Jackpot Nebula (because it contains a whopping four quasars, extremely bright objects created by particles accelerating away from black holes). But the new ELAN is a head-scratcher. The Slug and the Jackpot have bright quasars illuminating their dust and gases, but the light source inside the newfound ELAN is a mystery. [Photos: The 12 Strangest Places on Earth]

"What's really odd here, and one of the hooks of the story, is there's nothing," said Jason X Prochaska, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and one of the authors of the paper reporting the new nebula, available on the physics preprint website ArXiv. "There's the faint smudge of a galaxy, probably, but no quasar shining toward us.

03.03.2017 Viewed: 120

03.03.2017 Viewed: 92

03.03.2017 Viewed: 98

02.03.2017 Viewed: 105

02.03.2017 Viewed: 112