Four years ago, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in an attempt to learn just how common Earth-sized worlds are in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, scientists have unveiled part of the answer: About 17 percent – one in six – of Kepler’s target stars have Earth-sized worlds orbiting closer to their parent stars than…
The Large Hadron Collider will operate for two more months then shut down through 2014, allowing engineers to lay thousands more superconducting cables aimed at bringing the machine up to “full design energy.” This will vastly improve its capacity to simulate the moments after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago.
Alien planets born in widely separated two-star systems face a grave danger of being booted into interstellar space, a new study suggests. Exoplanets circling a star with a far-flung stellar companion — worlds that are part of “wide binary” systems — are susceptible to violent and dramatic orbital disruptions, including outright ejection, the study found….
Earth should have been an ice cube in the very early days of our solar system, when the sun was cooler than today. Yet the primordial Earth was a watery sphere. This “faint young sun” paradox has puzzled researchers for decades, but now a look at the atmosphere of one of Saturn’s moons suggests a…
Asteroids hold a great deal of scientific potential, but with our limitations on space travel, it’s exceedingly difficult to reach them and complete the necessary research. What’s a rocket scientist to do? There’s one surprisingly sensible solution: if NASA can’t get to the mountain, bring the mountain to NASA. Or more specifically, drag it into…
Joel Primack is a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His wife, Nancy Abrams, is a specialist in the history and philosophy of science. Together they deliver this motivational TEDx talk, which calls for a cosmological, Big History perspective as a means to solving some of our most difficult…
What if instead of dust and rocks, our planetary neighbor Mars were a bit more lush? What if it had oceans, an Earth-like atmosphere, and green life coating its land? These are the questions Kevin Gill, a software engineer living in New Hampshire, sought to answer with his project, A Living Mars.
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests. “It’s a staggering number, if you think about it,” lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. “Basically there’s one of these planets per star.” Swift and his colleagues arrived…
A dark lump of rock found in the Moroccan desert in 2011 is a new type of Martian meteorite, say scientists. Weighing 320g, the stone has been given the name Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034. Its texture and chemistry set it apart from all previous objects picked up off the surface of Earth but known to…
Astronomers studying a newborn star have caught a detailed glimpse of planets forming around it, revealing a never-before seen stage of planetary evolution. Large gas giant planets appear to be clearing a gap in the disk of material surrounding the star, and using gravity to channel material across the gap to the interior, helping the…