The rate of star formation in the universe has dropped to just 3% of its long-ago peak, and there’s no end in sight to the decline, a new study finds. A team of astronomers has determined that the rate of star birth peaked around 11 billion years ago, just 2.7 billion years after the Big…
NASA is serious about sending astronauts back to the moon’s neighborhood and will likely unveil its ambitious plans soon now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected, experts say. The space agency has apparently been thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon’s far side, both to establish a human presence in deep…
Astronomers have detected an alien planet that may be capable of supporting life as we know it — and it’s just a stone’s throw from Earth in the cosmic scheme of things. The newfound exoplanet, a so-called “super-Earth” called HD 40307g, is located inside its host star’s habitable zone, a just-right range of distances where…
A new view of the solar system’s early days proposes that the first two kinds of solid materials — the precursors of space rocks and ultimately planets — both formed at the same time. When the sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago, it was surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust that…
NASA’s Curiosity rover has gulped in Martian air but failed to find methane – a gas linked to living things. But it has turned up signs that Mars may have lost much of its original atmosphere. Since landing on the Red Planet’s surface Aug. 5, the Mars Science Laboratory rover has zapped rocks with its…
If we want to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it might be wise to look for stars with asteroid belts similar the one in our own Solar System. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, evolution goes faster and further when life has to make rapid changes to survive new environments — and…
Light from the very first stars in the universe has been measured – and there is less of it than previously thought. The discovery should help us better understand how the hot haze of hydrogen that existed shortly after the big bang transformed into the complex web of stars and galaxies we see today. Although…
Astronomers have measured the background light from all the stars in the cosmos and inferred the number of stars created since the dawn of the universe, Using observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists discovered emissions from distant blazars – gamma ray-emitting supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. As matter falls into…
Amir D. Aczel blogs about physics and cosmology for Discover’s Crux: If somebody told you that there are angels floating in space, observing our world and forming their impressions of our everyday reality, you would think that this person is nuts—a religious fanatic with an active imagination, and certainly not a scientist. Scientists, as we…
A newly spotted ultra-bright star explosion burst onto the scene just 1.5 billion years after the big bang, making it the earliest known supernova. The event is one of two supernovae recently found in the distant universe. The other occurred a mere 3 billion years after the birth of the cosmos. Both explosions are so-called…