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Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory’s facilities has resulted … Read more
The Universe is too heavy. According to our measurements of the normal matter in the Universe, there’s not nearly enough of it to account for the strength of the gravitational effects we can see. Whatever is making up the rest of the mass is nothing we can detect directly, and the quest to figure … Read more
We have a lot to thank meteorites for. Had they not instigated several mass extinction events, including wiping out non-avian dinosaurs, we probably wouldn’t be here today. But some things still don’t add up about the massive scale of decimation they can cause. “For decades scientists have puzzled over why some meteorites cause mass … Read more
In the search for “potentially-habitable” extrasolar planets, one of the main things scientists look at is stellar activity. Whereas stars like our own, a G-type (G2V) yellow dwarf, are considered stable over time, other classes are variable and prone to flare-ups – particularly M-type red dwarf stars. Even if a star has multiple planets … Read more
In the heart of the Milky Way, stars tread a complex measure. Bound by the gravitational field of the supermassive black hole in the galactic center, Sagittarius A*, a group of stars known as S-stars swoop on wild, years-long orbits. These orbits were recently studied to measure Sgr A*, a result that won the scientists … Read more
We thought that planets couldn’t form around stars with more than three times the mass of the sun, but planet b Cen (AB)b challenges the idea Space 8 December 2021 By Chen Ly The twin stars of the most massive planet-hosting star system to date, b Centauri, and its giant planet b Cen (AB)b ESO/Janson … Read more
A coronal mass ejection from the star EK Draconis was 10 times larger than any we have seen on our own sun Space 9 December 2021 By Chen Ly A coronal mass ejection on the sun photographed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory NASA Goddard Astronomers have seen a huge cloud of plasma erupting from the … Read more