University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have made an exciting discovery of a 3-million-year-old planet, TIDYE-1b – on a human scale, the equivalent in age to a two-week-old baby. This newly discovered planet challenges previous theories about the speed of planet formation. While Earth took 10-20 million years to form, TIDYE-1b emerged in a mere 3 million years and orbits its star roughly every week. 

In “The Miraculous from the Material,” MIT professor of the practice Alan Lightman offers 35 essays about scientific understanding, each corresponding to photos of spectacular natural phenomena, from spider webs to sunsets and from galaxies to hummingbirds.

New Haven, Conn. — Wings may be the obvious choice when studying the connection between dinosaurs and birds, but a pair of Yale paleontologists prefer drumsticks. That part of the leg, they say, is where fibular reduction among some dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago helped make it possible for peacocks to strut, penguins to waddle, and turkeys to trot.

“A good way to understand this is to take a look at drumsticks, like the ones people eat on Thanksgiving,” said Armita Manafzadeh, lead author of a new study in Nature. She is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, the Department of Earth & Planetary Science, and the Yale Peabody Museum.

“Under the meat of a drumstick, you’ll find two bones — the tibia, which is long and thick, and the fibula, which is much shorter and thinner,” Manafzadeh explained. “This shortened fibula is what allows birds to twist and turn around when they’re not in flight. And to understand its evolutionary story, we have to look at dinosaurs.”

Yet the fibula had been largely overlooked by paleontologists and other scientists, often viewed as merely a small remnant of a once-larger physiological feature. The idea that the shortened fibula had a distinct evolutionary benefit was relatively unexplored.

New evidence has been discovered explaining how supermassive black holes formed in the first billion years of the Universe's life. The study, conducted by INAF researchers, analyses 21 distant quasars and reveals that these objects are in a phase of extremely rapid accretion. This provides valuable insights into their formation and evolution, together with that of their host galaxies

Astronomers at the University of Toronto (U of T) have discovered the first pairs of white dwarf and main sequence stars – “dead” remnants and "living" stars – in young star clusters. Described in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, this breakthrough offers new insights on an extreme phase of stellar evolution, and one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics.