Space and astronomy news
Astronomers using a new technique may have not only found a super-Earth at a neighbouring star, but they may also have directly imaged it. And it could be nice and cozy in the habitable zone around Alpha Centauri.
The UAE Hope mission arrives at Mars today, kickng off a two year study of the Martian atmosphere. This is the first mission mounted by an Arab nation and offers inspiration for the future!
A new study out this month suggests that Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids may be more peculiar than previously thought. The Trojan asteroids are rocky objects which orbit the Sun just ahead of and just behind the gas giant, in gravitational sweet spots known as Lagrange points. The swarm ahead of Jupiter, known as the L4 (Greek) …
Like Earth, Mars has experienced periods of extreme glaciation or ice sheet coverage, which are known as ice ages. As these ice ages come and go, glaciers expand and contract along the planet’s surface, grinding huge boulders down to smaller rocks. By examining the size of boulders and rocks at specific locations on Mars, we …
Continue reading “Mars has Been Through Many Ice Ages in the Last Billion Years”
Red dwarf stars are the most common kind of star in our neighbourhood, and probably in the Milky Way. Because of that, many of the Earth-like and potentially life-supporting exoplanets we’ve detected are in orbit around red dwarfs. The problem is that red dwarfs can exhibit intense flaring behaviour, much more energetic than our relatively …
Continue reading “Stellar Flares May Not Condemn a Planet’s Habitability”
There’s a powerful scene in the movie “Contact” (one of my favs) where lead character Ellie Arroway is sitting among an array of telescopes and hears the first alien signal – an ominous pulse – received by humanity. She races back to the control center where the array is pointed off target and then back …
Continue reading “A Very Interesting Radio Signal was Just Detected Coming from Proxima Centauri”
According to new study by a team from UC Santa Cruz, the right amount of radioactive elements could also be crucial to habitability.
Star’s can be full of surprises; some of them nasty. While our own Sun appears pretty placid, science has shown us that’s not the case. Coronal mass ejections and solar flares are the Sun’s angry side. And the Sun has only a mild case of the flares, compared to some other stars.
It’s been a great month for planetary science. Scientists first discovered the chemical signature of phosphine on Venus, then found additional underground lakes on Mars. While no life has been conclusively found yet, science continues to take incremental steps toward proving what could be one of the most impactful discoveries in history: that we are …
Jupiter. Most massive planet in the solar system – twice that of all the other planets combined. This giant world formed from the same cloud of dust and gas that became our Sun and the rest of the planets. But Jupiter was the first-born of our planetary family. As the first planet, Jupiter’s massive gravitational …