Supernovae are one of the most fascinating events in stellar astrophysics. Most stars suffer explosions at some point of their last days but the most massive ones explode releasing incredible amounts of energy and rivaling in brightness with the rest of the galaxy they live in. What they leave behind is hydrogen enriched with materials […]
Last month, a lot of newspapers and websites have been promoting this article on Nature referring to a recent preprint uploaded by Stephen W. Hawking to the internet repository ArXiv. In this work, summarizing what he talked about in a conference given last August, the English physicist argue that, since event horizons, the definitory property […]
Time scales for astrophysical phenomena are sometimes thought to be overwhelmingly large and to exceed by far human life. While this is true for many cases, there are others which take the blink of an eye. Halfway between them, some interesting facts seem to happen in historical time scales and therefore have been analyzed by […]
Much attention has been payed lately to the novice comet C/2012 S1, more widely known as comet ISON. At the crest of the wave, it was even said that the integrated brightness of the comet after the perihelion could exceed that of the full moon. It was nicknamed “the comet of the century” and everybody […]
A lot of ink has been wasted in the last decades discussing whether string theory is a good description of nature or merely a mathematica construct with no connection at all with reality. However, the answer to this question actually lays at least in the middle of both options and for sure not any close […]
Todays story seems fairly simple: a magnetar has been seen spinning down. Impressive, isn’t it? You might be wondering what the hell is magnetar and why we should care about its spin. As it happens many times in science, we find nature behaving just the opposite to what we supposed it should. For scientists, this […]
We needed a Big Bang to create lithium, now it seems that it is much easier to destroy. This light element is the center piece of one of the most intriguing astronomical controversies. Can we use the lithium to look for planet-hosting stars? Why is it depleted in older stars? Anyway, Lithium seems to be […]
Go to a dark place and look to the night sky. How many stars you can count? This is an ancient question which can be traced back at least to the classic Greek philosophers. However, no matter how dark your sky is, the stars you are seeing are all related to our home, the Milky […]
TW Hydrae is a peculiar star. Although it is not bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye, it is relatively close to us, just 180 light-years away, and this makes it the closest T Tauri star in the sky. A T Tauri star is a solar system being born, they are still to […]
During the last year, a longtime forgotten controversy was reactivated by a very interesting paper written by J. Polchinski and his collaborators, in which they questioned whether the so called black hole complementarity principle is a good solution to the apparent information paradox of quantum gravity. This is a question that attracted a lot of […]