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.
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…
In the Marvel Universe, Bruce Banner exposed his body to high doses of gamma radiation during an experiment in his lab. The gamma radiation deformed Bruce’s DNA, so whenever he became angry, he could turn into the Hulk. In the real world, gamma radiation is a type of high energy radiation that is extremely dangerous…
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…
An international team of scientists recently detected a new cavity in the 4000 year old Great Pyramid of Egypt! The detection method, muon tomography, is non-intrusive and so the discovery still awaits confirmation using more traditional techniques that involve (minimally invasive) drills and flashlights. But let’s…
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…
Big News! Astrophysics receives a gift. Interferometers at LIGO and Virgo detected gravitational waves coming from two neutron stars merging. This detection not only supports Einstein's theory of relativity, but also teaches us even more about astrophysics that we didn't know before.
Astronomers have uncovered a supermassive black hole, weighing 17 billion suns, in the middle of nowhere. This nearly record-breaking supermassive black hole is in the center of a small galaxy cluster, which is a small town by universe standards. At the center of a given galaxy, there resides a supermassive black hole.…