Links 11/01/14

'Fish that appear drab to human eyes may see each other decked in brilliant greens, reds and oranges, say scientists who have found the first evidence of widespread biofluorescence in the animals.'

 'In spite of its need for moisturizing, the fish has essentially forsaken the sea and spends its entire life on land.'

Fish eats bird.

'Lauren Palladino of Vanderbilt University and her colleagues have now discovered an entirely new class of hypervelocity stars, and they behave quite differently. These 20 newly discovered stars are about the same size as our Sun, so they're relatively small. And surprisingly, none of them appear to come from the galactic core.'

 'There's a new kind of planet to add to Kepler's cornucopia of alien worlds, and you won't findit in Earth's own solar system.Ground-based follow-up observations of planets found by NASA's Kepler spacecraft revealthe masses and densities of 16 new planets ranging between one and four times the size ofEarth. Many of the newfound orbs, described here today (Jan. 6) at a meeting of the AmericanAstronomical Society, have a rocky core surrounded by a puffed-up envelope of gas, whichscientists are calling "sub-Neptunes" or "mini-Neptunes."'

Astronomers say that they have discovered the first example of a long-sought cosmic oddity: a bloated, dying star with a surprise in its core — an ultradense neutron star.

Portrait of a star about to go supernova.

 'Striking new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope capture, for the first time, the remains of a recent supernova brimming with freshly formed dust. If enough of this dust makes the perilous transition into interstellar space, it could explain how many galaxies acquired their dusty, dusky appearance.'

 Credit: NASA, ESA, and B. Siana and A. Alavi (University of California, Riverside)

The Hubble Telescope has imaged 58 young, small galaxies, part of a vast sea of faint galaxies that existed more than 10 billion years ago, during the heyday of star birth.