Tag Archives: dust

Seeing a newborn planet sculpting its dust disk for the first time

Seeing a newborn planet sculpting its dust disk for the first time

A swirl of gas and dust orbits a young star named HD 135344B, 440 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. Inside that haze, astronomers have spotted telltale spirals that most theories link to the tug of a growing world. Now, fresh images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) point to a compact object exactly where one of …

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Dancing dust devils trace raging winds on Mars

Dancing dust devils trace raging winds on Mars

Science & Exploration 08/10/2025 1611 views 15 likes In brief Combing through 20 years of images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft, scientists have tracked 1039 tornado-like whirlwinds to reveal how dust is lifted into the air and swept around Mars’s surface. Published today in Science Advances, their findings – including that the …

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Dust devils reveal surprising raging winds on Mars

Dust devils reveal surprising raging winds on Mars

Twenty years’ worth of imagery captured by two orbiters circling Mars has revealed raging winds on the red planet. Wind on the barren planet would be invisible if it weren’t for Mars’ iconic red dust, which was caught in the wind’s vortices, creating a phenomenon known as dust devils. These tornado-like whirlwinds also occur on Earth, but the new catalog …

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Dust storms around the Great Salt Lake more frequent than previously thought

Dust storms around the Great Salt Lake more frequent than previously thought

Editor’s note: This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake. SALT LAKE CITY — Health risks associated with dust pollution continue to kick up interest in the Great Salt Lake, and new research shows Utah’s …

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Mysterious “rogue planet” spotted gobbling 6 billion tons of gas and dust a second

Mysterious “rogue planet” spotted gobbling 6 billion tons of gas and dust a second

A mysterious “rogue planet” has been observed gobbling six billion tons of gas and dust a second — an unprecedented rate that blurs the line between planets and stars, astronomers said Thursday. Unlike Earth and other planets in our solar system, which orbit the sun, rogue planets float freely through the universe untethered to a star. Scientists estimate there could be …

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Exoplanet without a sun found gobbling up 6 billion tons of gas and dust per second

Exoplanet without a sun found gobbling up 6 billion tons of gas and dust per second

Scientists have identified a lone planet with a ferocious appetite. Located in the Chamaeleon constellation roughly 620 light-years away, the rogue planet, named Cha 1107-7626, exists in the vast emptiness of space, far from the warmth of any star. Rogue planets like this one are cosmic drifters — worlds that roam the galaxy untethered, unlike the familiar planets bound to …

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Devil in the Dust review – Guy Pearce leads old west outcasts on a supernatural mission with a message | Film

Devil in the Dust review – Guy Pearce leads old west outcasts on a supernatural mission with a message | Film

If not quite in the top tier of 21st-century westerns, this supernatural oater from director Ned Crowley has a distinctive silhouette. First off, the film is beautifully shot, from the opening scene, which tracks back from a hallucinatory landscape until we see the source of a strange sound: a riffled deck of cards in a desperado’s hands. And its central …

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James Webb Space Telescope reveals thick cosmic dust of Sagittarius B2, the most most enormous star-forming cloud in the Milky Way — Space photo of the week

James Webb Space Telescope reveals thick cosmic dust of Sagittarius B2, the most most enormous star-forming cloud in the Milky Way — Space photo of the week

Quick facts What it is: Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2) molecular cloud Where it is: 25,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius When it was shared: Sept. 24, 2025 Why it’s so special: Stars in the Milky Way galaxy are born in huge molecular clouds. The most massive is Sagittarius B2, which is just a few hundred light-years from our …

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