A carbonaceous meteorite that fell in Costa Rica holds organic compounds that are preserved from the earliest stages of our solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. These compounds may give us clues as to how and when life could have begun.
An observational technique called ‘beam-forming’ detects exoplanetary radio emissions that allow researchers to calculate exoplanets’ magnetic fields.
A mysterious cold gas shooting out of the center of the Milky Way galaxy has left scientists puzzled.
For the past few decades, scientists have been looking at planets outside of our solar system to see if they could host life. Now, scientists have discovered another factor for habitability: radiation from the planet’s central star.
The Cassini spacecraft revealed the atmosphere of Saturn has large regions that don’t cycle to the poles and that the atmosphere is filled with waves that disrupt circulation.
On a clear night you might easily see Jupiter, Mars or other planets from our solar system. This is how astronomers from thousands of years ago discovered the first planets. We cannot directly observe planets that are farther out in our solar system, as are Neptune and Uranus, so, of course, we cannot see planets that…
Baryon acoustic oscillations, an artifact remaining from the Big Bang, can be used by scientists to measure cosmological distances regardless of how the distances are changing. Soon after the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, all of the matter of the universe was packed densely into a much smaller space. The…
An asteroid recently came blazing through our solar system and it appears to be an interstellar visitor. The asteroid, dubbed A/2017 U1, would be the first interstellar object ever to be observed within our own solar system. A/2017 U1 caught the attention of astronomers because of its astounding speed. The quarter-mile…
Thanks to NASA’s Kepler Mission, over one-thousand potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered to-date, orbiting around their respective stars. An exoplanet refers to any planet outside of our solar system. The discoveries of these worlds are a major accomplishment for us, but the question still persists:…
A new field of science is born – astromaterial science. First mentioned in today’s paper, this scientific field studies materials of astronomical objects that are denser than materials commonly found on Earth. Scientists, M. E. Caplan and C. J. Horowitz, introduce the field of astromaterial science, starting…