We used three-dimensional imaging of ocean waves to capture freakish seas that produce a notorious phenomenon known as rogue waves. Our results are now published in Physical Review Letters. Rogue waves are giant colossi of the sea — twice as high as neighboring waves — that appear seemingly out of nowhere. Stories of unimaginable mountains ...
How Earth and the other planets of the solar system formed and evolved over the eons is a hot question for planetary scientists like me. One of the best ways to find out is by looking at rocks in space or meteorites on Earth. Getting the rocks is the hard part. Sending spacecraft to asteroids ...
After a decade of silence, one of the most powerful magnets in the universe suddenly burst back to life in late 2018. The reawakening of this “magnetar,” a city-sized star named XTE J1810-197, born from a supernova explosion, was an incredibly violent affair. The snapping and untwisting of the tangled magnetic field released enormous amounts ...
If you’ve ever been taught about how Earth orbits around the Sun, you might well think our planet travels along an oval-shaped path that brings it much closer to the Sun at some times of the year than at others. You’d have a good reason to think that, too: It’s how most textbooks show things. ...
Stars are born from huge clouds of mostly hydrogen gas floating in space. Astronomers like me study this gas because it helps us understand how stars and galaxies form and grow. Hydrogen gas gives off a faint glow that is invisible to human eyes but can be observed with a telescope tuned to detect radio ...
How fast can a neutron star drive powerful jets into space? The answer, it turns out, is about one-third the speed of light, as our team has just revealed in a new study published in Nature. Energetic cosmic beams known as jets are seen throughout our universe. They are launched when material — mainly dust ...
How stable are planetary systems? Will Earth and its seven siblings always continue in their steady celestial paths, or might we one day be randomly ejected from our cosmic home? Physicists understand the rules that govern the orbits of two celestial bodies, but as soon as a third is added (let alone a fourth, fifth, ...
About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was a very dark place. The glow of the universe’s explosive birth had cooled, and space was filled with dense gas — mostly hydrogen — with no sources of light. Slowly, over hundreds of millions of years, the gas was drawn into clumps by gravity, and ...
For decades, psychology departments worldwide have studied human behavior in darkened laboratories that restrict natural movements, such as walking. Our new study, published in Nature Communications, challenges the wisdom of this approach. Using virtual reality (VR), we have revealed previously hidden aspects of perception that occur during a simple everyday action — walking. We found ...
The Australian continent is now geologically stable. But volcanic rocks, lava flows, and a contemporary landscape dotted with extinct volcanoes show this wasn’t always the case. Between 40 and 20 million years ago — during the Eocene to Miocene epochs — there was widespread volcano activity across eastern Australia. In places such as western Victoria ...
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