New discoveries

Imagine a bride and a groom, whirling around each other in a romantic dance. The guests at the wedding party are all walking around the couple in one direction, like cars on a roundabout. Both the dancing pair and their wedding guests are on the same floor. A scientist...

A sand storm is not the best place to cook a meal or to bake a cake. The sand particles migh contaminate and affect the ingredients, and the end result would taste badly.In space, too, particles from outside may affect the way molecules are ‘cooked’. Using ALMA, astronomers have...

If you bake a cake, you need all kinds of ingredients, like flour, butter, sugar and eggs. You can’t makesomething from nothing! Likewise, when life first emerged on our planet, it needed its owningredients. Some of those, like carbon and oxygen, are readily available in the universe. But forother...

When two cars crash into each other, you end up with a lot of wreckage. The same is true for twocolliding galaxies. Over time, they may merge into one larger galaxy, but right after the crash,everything looks very chaotic.That’s the case with the galaxy NGC 6240, which has now...

We all know about environmental pollution. The air is polluted by cars, airplanes and factories. Theoceans are polluted with plastic. Humans produce a lot of filth that spreads throughout our world,slowly but surely.Now, astronomers have discovered the first environmental pollution in the universe. It’s notproduced by humans, but by...

The two images shown here look like the beautifully colored tails of peacocks, don’t you think?Well, think again. In reality, these are giant clouds of gas in a neighboring galaxy. The ‘feathers’ are long filaments of gas. Deep within the two clouds, the gas is compressed into several very...

Here’s an easy experiment you can do at home. Fill the kitchen sink with water. Then pull out theplug, and carefully watch how the water flows down the drain. You will notice that it doesn’tdisappear in a straight line. Instead, the water flows away in a rotating, spiral pattern.You’ll...

How much did you weigh when you were born? Most newborns are between 3 and 4 kilograms at birth. But not all. Some babies weigh much more or much less. It all depends on how fast they grew.  With baby stars, it’s the same. Most newborn stars can have...

Do you remember the last time you were on a merry-go-round on a playground or a fair? Because ofthe fast rotation, you felt like being pushed outward. It would be very hard to make your way to thecenter of the merry-go-round! The same ‘centrifugal force’ is at play in...

When astronomers looked at this new ALMA image, it reminded them of a pretzel – a pastry shapedlike a knot. But there are no real pretzels in space, of course. So what does the image really show?And what are the two bright spots in the center of the cosmic...

You probably know how to make soap bubbles. First, you put a ring of plastic or metal into a soapbath, and gently pull it out again. The ring is now filled with a thin film of soap. If you hold the ringstill, nothing will happen. But if you start...

Do you like watching the clouds? It’s a pleasing pastime. If you have enough imagination, the cloudabove your head sometimes resemble faces or animals. Here on Earth, we always look at the clouds from below. But on other planets, we can only seeclouds from above. Even with a large...