Space and astronomy news
Astronomers are keenly interested in red dwarfs and the planets that orbit them. Up to 85% of the stars in the Milky Way could be red dwarfs, and 40% of them might host Earth-like exoplanets in their habitable zones, according to some research.
But there are some problems with their potential habitability. One of those problems is tidal locking.
Continue reading “Are Planets Tidally Locked to Red Dwarfs Habitable? It’s Complicated”
You’d have to be in some kind of sense-of-wonder-repressed coma not to appreciate satellite images of Earth. If you are, then images from the NOAA’s newest satellite might pull you out of it.
And they’re only a taste of the fascinating images that it will provide.
Continue reading “NOAA’s New Weather Satellite is Operational, and its Pictures of Earth are Gorgeous”
The origin of Earth’s water has been an enduring mystery. There are different hypotheses and theories explaining how the water got here, and lots of evidence supporting them.
But water is ubiquitous in protoplanetary disks, and water’s origin may not be so mysterious after all.
Continue reading “Earth’s Water is 4.5 Billion Years Old”
Our understanding of habitability relies entirely on the availability of liquid water. All life on Earth needs it, and there’s every indication that life elsewhere needs it, too.
Can planets with frozen surfaces somehow have enough water to sustain life?
Continue reading “Could Life Survive on Frigid Exo-Earths? Maybe Under Ice Sheets”
The Oort Cloud is a collection of icy objects in the furthest reaches of the Solar System. It contains the most distant objects in the Solar System, and instead of orbiting on a plane like the planets or forming a ring like the Kuiper Belt, it’s a vast spherical cloud centred on the Sun. It’s where comets originate, and beyond it is interstellar space.
At least that’s what scientists think; nobody’s ever seen it.
Continue reading “The Oort Cloud Could Have More Rock Than Previously Believed”
As far as we know, nobody lives in our neighbour, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC.) So it’s okay to point our telescope there and gaze at it.
Continue reading “Hubble Sees a Glittering Jewel in the Small Magellanic Cloud. But the Jewel is Disappearing”
The Moon’s pock-marked surface tells the story of its history. It’s marked by over 9,000 impact craters, according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU.) The largest ones are called impact basins, not craters. According to a new study, asteroids didn’t create the basins; leftover planetesimals did.
Continue reading “Asteroids Didn’t Create the Moon’s Largest Craters. Left-Over Planetesimals Did”
About 13 billion years ago, the stars in the Universe’s earliest galaxies sent photons out into space. Some of those photons ended their epic journey on the James Webb Space Telescope’s gold-plated, beryllium mirrors in the last few months. The JWST gathered these primordial photons over several days to create its first “Deep Field” image.
Continue reading “Webb Completes its First “Deep Field” With Nine Days of Observing Time. What did it Find?”
Black holes are gluttonous behemoths that lurk in the center of galaxies. Almost everybody knows that nothing can escape them, not even light. So when anything made of simple matter gets too close, whether a planet, a star or a gas cloud, it’s doomed.
But the black hole doesn’t eat it at once. It plays with its food like a fussy kid. Sometimes, it spews out light.
When the black hole is not only at the center of a galaxy but the center of a cluster of galaxies, these burps and jets carve massive cavities out of the hot gas at the center of the cluster called radio bubbles.
Continue reading “A Black Hole has been Burping for 100 Million Years”
Astronomers discovered 55 Cancri e in 2004. That was five years before NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft was launched, and exoplanet science has come a long way in the intervening years. Astronomers discovered the planet with the radial velocity method rather than Kepler’s transit method. 55 Cancri e was the first super-Earth found around a main-sequence star. The 55 Cancri system was also the first star discovered with four, and then five, planets.
The discovery was big news then; over the years, follow-up work has revealed more details, including that 55 Cancri e is extremely close to its star and has a molten surface.
But one question remained unanswered: How did it get there?
Continue reading “This Hellish Planet Orbits its Star Every 18 Hours. How Did it Get There?”