Blue compact dwarf galaxies take their name from the intensely blue star-forming regions that are often found within their cores. One such region can be seen embedded in ESO 338-4, which is populated with bright young stars voraciously consuming hydrogen. These massive stars are doomed to a short existence, as despite their vast supplies of hydrogen fuel. The nuclear reactions in the cores of these stars will burn through these supplies in only millions of years — a mere blink of an eye in astronomical terms....

NGC 1277 has been dubbed a “relic of the early Universe” because all of its stars appear to have formed about 12 billion years ago. To put this in perspective, the Big Bang is thought to have happened 13.8 billion years ago. Teeming with billions of old, metal-rich stars, this galaxy is also home to many ancient globular clusters: spherical bundles of stars that orbit a galaxy like satellites. Uniquely, the globular clusters of NGC 1277 are mostly red and metal-rich — very different to the blue, metal-poor clusters usually seen around similarly-sized galaxies....

The enormous gravitational influence of such clusters distorts the space around them in such a way that they can be used as giant cosmic lenses that magnify distant background galaxies. Studying some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe will tell us more about our cosmic origins. RXC J0232.2-4420 also featured in a study that focused on galaxy clusters that are especially luminous sources of X-rays. The study searched for diffuse light around the brightest galaxies in the clusters, among the most massive galaxies in the Universe....

ESO 415-19’s peculiarity made it a great target for Hubble. This observation comes from an ongoing campaign to explore the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a menagerie of some of the weirdest and most wonderful galaxies that the Universe has to offer. These galaxies range from bizarre lonesome galaxies to spectacularly interacting galaxy pairs, triplets, and even quintets. These space oddities are spread throughout the night sky, which means that Hubble can spare a moment to observe them as it moves between other observational targets....

Hubble Sheds Light on Origins of Supermassive Black Holes Astronomers have identified a rapidly growing black hole in the early universe that is considered a crucial “missing link” between young star-forming galaxies and the first supermassive black holes. They used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make this discovery. Until now, the monster, nicknamed GNz7q, had been lurking unnoticed in one of the best-studied areas of the night sky, the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-North (GOODS-North) field....

New research reveals a river deep under the ice in Antarctica that is 285 miles (460 km) long, making it longer than the River Thames. The study details how it collects water at the base of the Antarctic ice sheet from an area the size of Germany and France combined. Its discovery shows the base of the ice sheet has more active water flow than previously thought, which could make it more susceptible to changes in climate....

Model from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory identifies “serial hijackers” of internet IP addresses. Existing efforts to detect IP hijacks tend to look at specific cases when they’re already in process. But what if we could predict these incidents in advance by tracing things back to the hijackers themselves? That’s the idea behind a new machine-learning system developed by researchers at MIT and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD)....

Virologists at the KU Leuven Rega Institute have been working on two lines of SARS-CoV-2 research: searching for a vaccine to prevent infection, and testing existing drugs to see which one can reduce the amount of virus in infected people. To test the efficacy of the vaccine and antivirals preclinically, the researchers use hamsters. The rodents are particularly suitable for SARS-CoV-2 research because the virus replicates itself strongly in hamsters after infection....

A heart attack doesn’t just damage heart muscle tissue by cutting off its blood supply, it also sets off an inflammatory cascade that worsens underlying atherosclerosis, actively increasing the risk for a future heart attack. These findings from a study receiving advance online publication in the journal Nature suggest an important new therapeutic strategy for preventing heart attacks and strokes, both of which are caused when atherosclerotic plaques rupture and block important blood vessels....

“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. As part of an international collaboration for Webb’s Early Release Science program, De Pater led the observations of Jupiter with Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory. Webb itself is an international mission led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency)....

A rare cosmic zoom lens, which uses the gravity of a large mass to magnify light from distant objects, has allowed a team of US and European astronomers to spot a galaxy so remote that its light was emitted 490 million years after the Big Bang, which is 3.6% of the Universe’s current age. The infant galaxy, MACS1149-JD1, is too faint to be seen by Hubble alone, which needed the gravity lens to discriminate the object....

The placentas from 16 women who tested positive for COVID-19 while pregnant showed evidence of injury, according to pathological exams completed directly following birth, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The type of injury seen in the placentas shows abnormal blood flow between the mothers and their babies in utero, pointing to a new complication of COVID-19. The findings, though early, could help inform how pregnant women should be clinically monitored during the pandemic....

More than a year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, several vaccines have been authorized thanks to unprecedented worldwide research efforts. These first-generation vaccines bring great hope and are a mainstay in fighting the virus. However, questions persist regarding the duration of the immune response or the need for a booster. Also, controlling the pandemic means vaccinating billions of people. Yet manufacturing sufficient doses to protect the entire world population represents a considerable challenge....

The discovery that free electrons can move asymmetrically provides a deeper understanding of one of the basic processes in physics: the photoelectric effect. It was first described by Albert Einstein and explains how high-frequency light releases electrons from a material. The results have been published in Physical Review Letters. “The photoelectric effect has been studied for many years and it’s very uplifting to suddenly understand how it works in a deeper way,” says Marcus Dahlström, Associate Senior Lecturer of Mathematical Physics at Lund University in Sweden, who worked on the article with colleagues in Lund and at Stockholm University....

Radio astronomers view the universe in several ranges of wavelengths we call bands. The Very Large Array (VLA) uses wavelengths ranging from 4 meters to less than a centimeter. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) uses radio bands ranging from a couple of centimeters to a third of a millimeter. But why do radio telescopes use such a wide range of wavelengths? The answer lies in the many ways that objects emit radio light, and how this light interacts with the gas and dust of interstellar space....

“Nearly all studies investigating the effects of natural environments on human health are focused on the amount of a community’s green space,” said the scholars in a paper describing their project. “We found that the shape or form of green space has an important role in this association.” Their paper was published in the November 2019 issue of The Lancet Planetary Health. In the study, Wang and Tassinary performed statistical analyses of Philadelphia land cover data to assess links between landscape spatial metrics and health outcomes....

Examining data collected by the ultraviolet spectrograph and energetic-particle detector instruments aboard the Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft, a team led by Barry Mauk of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, observed signatures of powerful electric potentials, aligned with Jupiter’s magnetic field, that accelerate electrons toward the Jovian atmosphere at energies up to 400,000 electron volts. This is 10 to 30 times higher than the largest auroral potentials observed at Earth, where only several thousands of volts are typically needed to generate the most intense auroras — known as discrete auroras — the dazzling, twisting, snake-like northern and southern lights seen in places like Alaska and Canada, northern Europe, and many other northern and southern polar regions....

Females are thought to prefer colorful males because only ‘high-quality’ males — those with the most resources, superior foraging skills or social status — can produce and maintain the most vibrant colors. By choosing these high-quality males, females may ensure a good father or good genes for their offspring. But do high quality males that are preferred by females invest more in their appearance? A new study by Monash University ornithologists suggests, not necessarily....

Many treatments for COVID-19 focus on the spike protein that the virus uses to bind to human cells. While those treatments work well on the original variant, they may not be as effective on future ones. The Omicron variant, for example, has several spike mutations. Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Juan de Pablo and his group have used advanced computational simulations to examine another protein that’s crucial to the virus’s replication and remains relatively consistent across different coronaviruses....

“This flyby is a historic achievement,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Never before has any spacecraft team tracked down such a small body at such high speed so far away in the abyss of space. New Horizons has set a new bar for state-of-the-art spacecraft navigation.” The new images — taken from as close as 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) on approach — revealed Ultima Thule as a “contact binary,” consisting of two connected spheres....