It often feels like when people die, they leave a void behind. In the case of massive stars, that happens to be physically true. A new analysis of the tenuous gas that drifts between the stars in the Milky Way galaxy has revealed the imprint of bubbles that expand into space when a massive star […]
A type of poliovirus derived from vaccines has been detected in London sewage samples, the World Health Organization and British health officials said Wednesday, adding that more analysis was underway. No human cases of polio have been found in Britain, where the crippling disease was fully eradicated two decades ago. The WHO said in […]
The big question is whether the wider public is at risk. Dr Saliba said: “Vaccine-derived poliovirus is rare and the risk to the public overall is extremely low. “Most of the UK population will be protected from vaccination in childhood.” Dr Saliba added: “We are urgently investigating to better understand the extent of this transmission […]
The UK has declared a national incident after detecting poliovirus samples in sewage, as health authorities said the disease may be spreading between “closely linked” individuals. The UK Health Security Agency on Wednesday said it was investigating whether community transmission, or transmission between individuals without known links, was under way. No polio cases have been identified […]
The colossal shock wave generated by the first stages of a collision between some of the most massive structures in the Universe has just been seen and imaged for the first time. The detection was found in the galaxy cluster Abell 98, which is a large structure made up of three smaller sub-clusters of […]
A strange gap between theoretical predictions and experimental results in a major neutrino research project could be a sign of the elusive ‘sterile’ neutrino – a particle so quiet, it can only be detected by the silence it leaves in its wake. It’s not the first time the anomaly has been seen, adding to […]
When massive stars die, they don’t do so quietly. Their deaths are spectacularly brilliant affairs that light up the cosmos, a supernova explosion that sends star guts punching out into space in a cloud of splendor. Meanwhile, the core of the star-that-was can linger on, collapsed into an ultra-dense neutron star or black hole. […]
A new member of a category of star so rare we can count the known number of them on our fingers and toes has just been discovered in the Milky Way. It’s called MAXI J1816-195, located no greater than 30,000 light-years away. Preliminary observations and investigations suggest that it’s an accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar – […]
Quasar: Brightest object EVER reaches Earth Lying some 2.4 billion light-years from the Earth, in the constellation of Virgo, “3C273” is not only the brightest quasar on record, but also the first to be discovered and the best studied. In fact, its luminosity in the radio band means that 3C273 is often used to standardise […]
Health authorities in Germany have issued a horrifying warning as a new case of a very rare disease known as Borna disease has been detected. Also known as sad horse disease, this fatal illness comes from the Borna Disease Virus (BDV) and is an infectious neurological syndrome affecting warm-blooded animals. Local authorities in the country […]