TRAPPIST-1: How Flat Can a Planetary System Get?
The planets of the solar system all orbit the Sun more-or-less in a plane. Compared to the Earth’s orbit, which defines the plane at zero…
The planets of the solar system all orbit the Sun more-or-less in a plane. Compared to the Earth’s orbit, which defines the plane at zero…
A new discovery is shedding light on how fluorine — an element found in our bones and teeth as fluoride — is forged in the…
A new astrogeology study suggests that most nearby rocky exoplanets are quite unlike anything in our Solar System. An astronomer from NSF’s NOIRLab has teamed…
New study marks most distant detection of required element for life as we know it in a regular star-forming galaxy. Water has been detected in…
New calculations show that a black hole slurping down a star may not have generated enough energy to launch a neutrino. In October 2019, a…
Using Neutron Stars To Detect Dark Matter The search for dark matter may need a detector larger than we can build on Earth, but it…
Until now, astronomers have found all other known exoplanets and exoplanet candidates in the Milky Way galaxy, almost all less than about 3,000 light-years from…
Our Universe shines bright with light across the electromagnetic spectrum. While most of this light comes from stars like our Sun in galaxies like our…
About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed something very interesting about the Universe. The fact that it was in a state of expansion had been known…
A mega-comet – potentially the largest ever discovered – is heading from the Oort Cloud towards our direction. Estimated to be 100–200 kilometers across, the…
The center of the Milky Way is a mysterious place. Astronomers think there’s a supermassive black hole there, though it could be dark matter instead….
An international team of astrophysicists from South Africa, the UK, France and the US have found large variations in the brightness of light seen from…
Webb will tackle the challenge of the supermassive black hole’s puzzling flares, which have proved both intriguing and frustrating for astronomers. In its first year…
An international team of scientists, using the ground-based Gemini Observatory telescope in Chile, is the first to directly measure the amount of both water and…
A new analysis of the South Pole-based telescope’s cosmic microwave background observations has all but ruled out several popular models of inflation. Physicists looking for…
The supernova remnant G344.7-0.1 is across the Milky Way about 19,600 light-years from Earth. It belongs to a class of supernovas called “Type Ia” that…
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are an energetic phenomenon that is one of today’s greatest cosmic mysteries. These mysterious flashes of light can be seen in…
Wind the cosmic clock back a few billion years and our Solar System looked much different than it does today. About 4.5 billion years ago,…