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 Soon, the growing capability of your smartphone could be harnessed to detect cosmic rays in much the same way as high-end, multimillion-dollar observatories.

With a simple app addition, Android phones, and likely other smartphone brands in the not-too-distant future, can be turned into detectors to capture the light particles created when cosmic rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere.

“The apps basically transform the phone into a high-energy particle detector,” explains Justin Vandenbroucke, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of physics and a researcher at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). “It uses the same principles as these very large experiments.”
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Black holes are possibly one of the most mysterious and unfathomable entities in the known universe. They are generally considered to be black, dense bodies of matter with a gravitational pull that is so strong that even light itself cannot escape their unrelenting grasp.

But, in the largely uncharted environment of deep space, our hypotheses regarding the nature and composition of its constituents must occasionally be found lacking as new evidence comes to light.
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Astronomers have made some very interesting discoveries in space recently, each potentially bringing them one step closer to finding habitable exo-planets with signs of extra-terrestrial life-forms.

A study appearing this week in the journal Nature revealed findings extracted from the combined offerings of three NASA space telescopes: Hubble, Spitzer, and Kepler. Data from the telescopes showed clear skies and steamy water vapor on a gaseous planet outside our solar system.
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Hopes of finding intelligent life in the universe have been raised by more unidentified signals from outer space detected by astronomers in Puerto Rico, validating reports of similar signals identified by researchers in Australia.

The discovery of a split-second burst of radio waves by scientists using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico provides important new evidence of mysterious pulses that appear to come from deep in outer space.
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