An enormous cloud of hot gas is surrounding two merging spiral galaxies. 

This gas reservoir contains the mass of 10 billion Suns, spans 300,000 light years, and radiates at more 7 million degrees.

| image: NASA/CXC

An international team has discovered an exotic double object that consists of a tiny, but unusually heavy neutron star that spins 25 times each second, orbited every two and a half hours by a white dwarf star. The neutron star is a pulsar that is giving off radio waves that can be picked up on Earth by radio telescopes. Although this unusual pair is very interesting in its own right it is also a unique laboratory for testing the limits of physical theories.

This pulsar is named PSR J0348+0432 and is the remains of a supernova explosion. It is twice as heavy as the Sun, but just 20 kilometres across. The gravity at its surface is more than 300 billion times stronger than that on Earth and at its centre every sugar-cubed-sized volume has more than one billion tonnes of matter squeezed into it. Its companion white dwarf star is only slightly less exotic; it is the glowing remains of a much lighter star that has lost its atmosphere and is slowly cooling.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime created by the presence of mass and energy, has withstood all tests since it was first published almost a century ago. But it cannot be the final explanation and must ultimately break down. 

Full article (via ESO)

The science is irrefutable ;)

A new Chandra image of SN 1006 provides new details about the remains of an exploded star.

This explosion was witnessed from Earth over a millennium ago.

The Chandra data provides the best map to date of the debris field including information on important elements expanding into space.

SN 1006 belongs to a class of supernova used to measure the expansion of the Universe. (Read More) | image credit: NASA/CXC

Darwin’s frog (Rhinoderma darwinii) is a rhinodermatid frog native to the forest streams of Chile and Argentina.

The most striking feature is the way the tadpoles are raised—inside the vocal sac of the male. 

Mouth brooding

The female lays about 30 eggs and then the male guards them for about two weeks, until they hatch. Then the male takes all the survivors and carries around the developing young in his vocal pouch. The tadpoles develop in their baggy chin skin, feeding off their egg yolk. When the tiny tadpoles have developed (about half an inch) they hop out and swim away. | Source

Illustrative picture of wave-particle duality , which shows how the same phenomenon can be perceived in two different ways.

Stars the size of the Sun end their lives as tiny and faint white dwarf stars. But as they make the final transition into retirement their atmospheres are blown away into space. For a few tens of thousands of years they are surrounded by the spectacular and colourful glowing clouds of ionised gas known as planetary nebulae.

This new image from the VLT shows the planetary nebula IC 1295, which lies in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells that make it resemble a micro-organism seen under a microscope, with many layers corresponding to the membranes of a cell. (Read more)

Tarsiers’ Bulging Eyes Shed Light On Evolution of Human Vision

After eons of wandering in the dark, primates developed highly acute, three-color vision that permitted them to shift to daytime living, a new Dartmouth College study suggests.

The findings challenge the prevailing view that trichromatic color vision, a hallmark of primate evolution, evolved only after they started getting up with the sun, a shift that gave rise to anthropoid (higher) primates, which, in turn, gave rise to the human lineage. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The authors based their findings on a genetic study of tarsiers, the enigmatic elfin primate that branched off early on from monkeys, apes and humans. Tarsiers have a number of unusual traits — from their ability to communicate in the pure ultrasound to their iconic bulging eyes. Such sensory specializations have long fueled debate on the adaptive origins of anthropoid primates. (Keep reading)

| image credit: Dartmouth College

W3 is an enormous stellar nursery about 6200 light-years away in the Perseus Arm, one of the Milky Way galaxy’s main spiral arms, that hosts both low- and high-mass star formation. In this image, the low-mass protostars are seen as tiny yellow dots embedded in cool red filaments, while the highest-mass stars – with greater than eight times the mass of our Sun – emit intense radiation, heating up the gas and dust around them and appearing here in blue. W3 Main and W3 (OH) contain the most recent high-mass star formation. (Read more)

Image credit: ESA

The Sabi Sand game reserve has launched South Africa’s first large-scale operation to counter the ravages of rhino poaching. The horns are infused by a non-lethal chemical mixture designed to sicken anyone using it as a traditional medicine. A key additive to the Sabi Sand treatments is an indelible pink dye which exposes the presence of smuggled horns on airport scanners worldwide and warns consumers that the ground-up product is hazardous. The picture shows the toxification process under way at Sabi Sand this month. | image by David Smith

A Bruce Effect in Wild Geladas

Female rodents are known to terminate pregnancies after exposure to unfamiliar males (“Bruce effect”). Although laboratory support abounds, direct evidence for a Bruce effect under natural conditions is lacking. Here, we report a strong Bruce effect in a wild primate, the gelada (Theropithecus gelada). Female geladas terminate 80% of pregnancies in the weeks after a dominant male is replaced. Further, data on interbirth intervals suggest that pregnancy termination offers fitness benefits for females whose offspring would otherwise be susceptible to infanticide. Taken together, data support the hypothesis that the Bruce effect can be an adaptive strategy for females. 

via Science.com | image: source

The Universe is an old neighbourhood — roughly 13.8 billion years old. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is also ancient — some of its stars are more than 13 billion years old (eso0425). Nevertheless, there is still a lot of action: new objects form and others are destroyed. In this image, you can see some of the newcomers (bright blue), the young stars forming the cluster NGC 2547.

| image credit: ESO