Best of Last Week – New type of planet found, workload sharing robot limbs and clues about where all the antimatter went
(Phys.org) —It's been a busy week for space scientists—a team of astronomers discovered the first Thorne-Zytkow object—it's a weird type of hybrid between a red supergiant and a neutron star that looks like a regular red supergiant, except it has a different type of chemical signature, giving it away. Another team of astronomers found a new type of planet: The 'mega-Earth'. It's rocky and weighs 17 times as much as our own planet. And yet another team has found that surprisingly strong magnetic fields challenge black holes' pull. Black holes surveyed had magnetic strength equal to their gravitational pull, the first such direct evidence of it. In related news, theories suggest there should be equal amounts of antimatter and matter in the universe, yet we're not able to detect any unless we create it ourselves. Now a CERN experiment takes us one step closer to discovering where all the antimatter...