Jacob Haqq-Misra, Ravi Kopparapu, and Eric Wolf attempt to address this question in a recent paper titled "Why do we find ourselves around a yellow star instead of a red star?" and published in International Journal of Astrobiology.
Radio astronomers working with a radio dish telescope detected something a bit unusual. They were seeing a very fast radio burst, faster and more irregular than any signal in the history of radio astronomy. This radio burst was coming at very short time scales, lasting just a few milliseconds. The signal was irregular,…
In a last scientific hurrah, the Cassini spacecraft has detected that hydrogen is being ejected from the moon’s ice-covered ocean.
Large stars and planets in space have intense gravity. The gravity of these large celestial bodies is so strong, that they actually warp the empty space around them. Also, in space, time progresses differently when near celestial bodies. Because of these effects on space and time, space is regarded as a space-time…
Our understanding of astrophysics states that we should be seeing co-orbiting planets when astronomers look through their telescopes. Co-orbiting planets are planets of roughly similar size that have overlapping orbits around their host star. These two planets orbit so closely to each other that they influence the…
At the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, there is a supermassive black hole. This is normal — at the center of almost every galaxy there is a black hole that is millions or billions times heavier than our sun. As galaxies move through the universe, they occasionally collide (the Milky Way is currently colliding with…
Using an experiment carried into space on a NASA suborbital rocket, astronomers at Caltech and their colleagues have detected a diffuse cosmic glow that appears to represent more light than that produced by known galaxies in the universe. The researchers, including Caltech Professor of Physics Jamie Bock and Caltech…
Cutting-edge paper by Professor George Fraser — who tragically died in March this year — and colleagues at the University of Leicester provides first potential indication of direct detection of Dark Matter — something that has been a mystery in physics for over 30 years. Space scientists at the…
Massive galaxies in the Universe have stopped making their own stars and are instead snacking on nearby galaxies, according to research by Australian scientists. Astronomers looked at more than 22,000 galaxies and found that while smaller galaxies are very efficient at creating stars from gas, the most massive galaxies…
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) — among other telescopes — have determined that our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified ginormous supercluster of galaxies, which they have dubbed “Laniakea,” which means “immense…