After nearly 60 years since the first discovery, only a handful of similar high-mass X-ray binaries have been detected. Many more of them were expected to exist, especially given that many binary black holes (the future states of high-mass X-ray binaries) have been discovered with gravitational waves in the past few years. There are also many binaries found in our Galaxy that are expected to eventually become a high-mass X-ray binary....

The research published recently in Nature Nanotechnology builds on a discovery from two years ago, when the researchers created what was then the thinnest memory storage device. In this new work, the researchers reduced the size even further, shrinking the cross section area down to just a single square nanometer. Getting a handle on the physics that pack dense memory storage capability into these devices enabled the ability to make them much smaller....

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope recently detected a solar flare that produced enough gamma rays to briefly make the sun the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky. The flare earned a classification of X5.4 and the flux of high-energy gamma rays was 1,000 times greater than the sun’s steady output. During a powerful solar blast on March 7, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected the highest-energy light ever associated with an eruption on the sun....

“TESS data let us see exactly when this destructive event, named ASASSN-19bt, started to get brighter, which we’ve never been able to do before,” said Thomas Holoien, a Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. “Because we identified the tidal disruption quickly with the ground-based All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), we were able to trigger multiwavelength follow-up observations in the first few days. The early data will be incredibly helpful for modeling the physics of these outbursts....

The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades. Now a team of astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil has crowned it the largest-known spiral, based on archival data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which has since been loaned to the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. Measuring tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, NGC 6872 spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our Milky Way galaxy....

Little is known about general anesthetics, the drugs that put patients in a coma-like state, feeling no pain or discomfort while being operated on. A new study shows that these classes of drugs change the activity of a specific region of the brain and make it more difficult for the parts to communicate. The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Laura Lewis, a neuroscientist at MIT in Cambridge, and her colleagues used microelectrodes to measure the activity of single cells and networks of neurons in the brains of three people who were about to undergo neurosurgery for epilepsy....

While there is little debate about whether water previously existed on Mars, the debate regarding what the climate of Mars was like around 4 billion years ago has persisted for decades. Mars has a surprisingly diverse landscape, made up of valley networks, lake basins, and possible ocean shorelines. These ancient fluvial features all provide clues that early Mars may have had a warm and wet climate, similar to Earth’s. However, this idea has challenges....

An international study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden has found that a collision in the asteroid belt 470 million years ago created drastic changes to life on Earth. The breakup of a major asteroid filled the entire inner solar system with enormous amounts of dust leading to a unique ice age and, subsequently, to higher levels of biodiversity. The unexpected discovery could be relevant for tackling global warming if we fail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions....

The Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment, or CHIME for short, is one of six new missions that the EU and ESA are developing to expand the current suite of Copernicus Sentinels. Data from the Sentinels feed into a range of Copernicus services that address challenges such as urbanization, food security, rising sea levels, diminishing polar ice, natural disasters, and climate change. The six Copernicus Sentinel Expansion missions will add to the present capabilities of the Sentinels to further address EU policy priorities and gaps in Copernicus user needs....

A team of researchers from McGill University, along with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, the University of Texas (Austin), and the University of Maryland, has estimated the total global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from natural gas-fired power plants to be 3.6 billion tonnes annually. This estimation was arrived at by gathering data from 108 countries across the world and quantifying emissions by country. The team found that this amount could be reduced by as much as 71% if various mitigation techniques were adopted globally....

Storm-stirred sediment produced colorful swirls along the western coast of Florida. Hurricane Ian barreled into Florida’s southwestern coast on September 28, 2022, as a powerful category-4 storm with sustained winds of about 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour. However, wind was not the only destructive component of the powerful storm; water was also a major factor, in the form of a catastrophic storm surge, relentless downpours, and intense flooding. The redistribution of water is clearly evident in these natural-color satellite images, which show colorful swirls of sediment that the storm stirred up in Florida’s coastal waters....

The InSight lander, its heat shield, and parachute were spotted by HiRISE (which stands for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) in one set of images last week on December 6, and again on Tuesday, December 11. The lander, heat shield, and parachute are within 1,000 feet (several hundred meters) of one another on Elysium Planitia, the flat lava plain selected as InSight’s landing location. In images released today, the three new features on the Martian landscape appear teal....

The World Health Organization reports that as of January 19, 2021, there are approximately 94 million cases of COVID-19 globally, with over 2 million deaths. In the face of these numbers — driven in part by an aggressive resurgence of the virus in the U.S. — health authorities face a tenuous balancing act: how to enact policies to keep citizens safe while doing the least possible damage to quality of life and local economies, especially in smaller cities and towns, where short supply of intensive care units and tight budgets make the thin line between precautionary measures and normalcy even thinner....

A new study shows that hunting by house cats can have big effects on local animal populations because they kill more prey, in a given area, than similar-sized wild predators. This effect is mostly concentrated relatively close to a pet cat’s home, since most of their movement was a 100-meter radius of their homes, usually encompassing a few of their neighborhood’s yards on either side. Researchers from NC State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences collaborated with scientists and citizen scientists from six countries to collect GPS cat-tracking data and prey-capture reports from 925 pet cats, with most coming from the U....

Potentially life-threatening heart issues can be caused by COVID-19 infections. Scientific studies suggest that people with COVID-19 are 55% more likely to suffer a major adverse cardiovascular event, including heart attack, stroke, and death, than those without COVID-19. They’re also more likely to have other heart issues, like arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle). Andrew Marks, a cardiologist and biophysics professor at Columbia University, Steven Reiken, a research scientist in Marks’ lab, and colleagues, have studied some of the changes that occur in the heart that could lead to these problems....

Study suggests testing and contact tracing and population behavioral changes — measures which have far less disruptive social and economic impact than total lockdown — can meaningfully control COVID-19. Hong Kong appears to have averted a major COVID-19 outbreak up to March 31, 2020, by adopting far less drastic control measures than most other countries, with a combination of border entry restrictions, quarantine and isolation of cases and contacts, together with some degree of social distancing, according to a new observational study published in The Lancet Public Health journal....

The subject of this image is known as NGC 691, and it can be found some 120 million light-years from Earth. This galaxy was one of the thousands of objects discovered by astronomer William Herschel during his prolific decades-long career spent hunting for, characterizing, and cataloging a wide array of the galaxies and nebulae visible throughout the night sky — almost 200 years before Hubble was even launched. The intricate detail visible in this Picture of the Week would likely be extraordinary to Herschel....

Not only is the resulting image the deepest picture of the neutron star collision’s afterglow to date, it also reveals secrets about the origins of the merger, the jet it created and the nature of shorter gamma-ray bursts. “This is the deepest exposure we have ever taken of this event in visible light,” said Northwestern’s Wen-fai Fong, who led the research. “The deeper the image, the more information we can obtain....

The discovery confirms a long-held theory that the supernova, dubbed SN 1993J, occurred inside what is called a binary system, where two interacting stars caused a cosmic explosion. “This is like a crime scene, and we finally identified the robber,” said Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at University of California (UC) at Berkeley. “The companion star stole a bunch of hydrogen before the primary star exploded.” SN 1993J is an example of a Type IIb supernova, unusual stellar explosions that contains much less hydrogen than found in a typical supernova....

Galaxies can take many forms — elliptical blobs, swirling spiral arms, bulges, and disks are all known components of the wide range of galaxies we have observed using telescopes like the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. However, some of the more intriguing objects in the sky around us include ring galaxies like the one pictured above — Zw II 28. Ring galaxies are mysterious objects. They are thought to form when one galaxy slices through the disk of another, larger, one — as galaxies are mostly empty space, this collision is not as aggressive or as destructive as one might imagine....