Reference Terms
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Interstellar medium
The interstellar medium (or ISM) is the name astronomers give to the tenuous gas and dust that pervade interstellar space.
Note: The above text is excerpted from the Wikipedia article "Interstellar medium", which has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
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Space & Time News
November 22, 2024
Nov. 21, 2024 — A massive collision of galaxies sparked by one travelling at a scarcely-believable 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) has been seen in unprecedented detail by one of Earth's most powerful telescopes. The dramatic impact was observed in Stephan's ...
Nov. 21, 2024 — While astronomers have taken about two dozen zoomed-in images of stars in our galaxy, unveiling their properties, countless other stars dwell within other galaxies, so far away that observing even one of them in detail has been extremely ...
Nov. 13, 2024 — An asteroid struck Mars 11 million years ago and sent pieces of the red planet hurtling through space. One of these chunks of Mars eventually crashed into the Earth and is one of the few meteorites that can be traced directly to Mars. This meteorite ...
Nov. 13, 2024 — Astronomers have identified three ultra-massive galaxies -- nearly as massive as the Milky Way -- already in place within the first billion years after the Big Bang. This surprising discovery was made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope's ...
Latest Headlines
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Nov. 21, 2024 — Axions are the most likely candidate for enigmatic dark matter that dominates the universe. Astrophysicists are searching for evidence of high-mass axions produced during supernovae. Scientists ...
Nov. 20, 2024 — Researchers used the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to map how nearly 6 million galaxies cluster across 11 billion years of cosmic history. Their observations line up with what Einstein's ...
Nov. 19, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered the first pairs of white dwarf and main sequence stars -- 'dead' remnants and 'living' stars -- in young star clusters. ...
Nov. 18, 2024 — New research found confined and isolating environments changed the way people smelled and responded emotionally to certain food aromas. The team in this study compared 44 people's emotional responses ...
Nov. 18, 2024 — Through the intricate study of lava tubes -- caves formed following volcanic eruptions when lava cools down -- an international team of researchers has uncovered clues about Earth's ancient ...
Nov. 18, 2024 — A theoretical astrophysicist may have solved a nearly two-decade-old mystery over the origins of an unusual 'zebra' pattern seen in high-frequency radio pulses from the Crab ...
Nov. 14, 2024 — By probing chemical processes observed in the Earth's hot mantle, scientists have started developing a library of basalt-based spectral signatures that not only will help reveal the composition of ...
Nov. 14, 2024 — How long did it take our Sun to form in its stellar nursery? Scientists are now closer to an answer. They succeeded in the measurement of the ...
Nov. 13, 2024 — Scientists using observations from NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of ...
Nov. 12, 2024 — The chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe -- and in any hypothetical ones beyond it -- can be estimated by a new theoretical model ...