A star already known to host five alien planets may actually be home to a whopping nine full-fledged worlds – a planetary arrangement that, if confirmed, would outnumber our own solar system and set a new record for the most populated system of extrasolar planets yet found. The sun-like star, called HD 10180, is located…
Research by a Danish physicist suggests that the explosion of massive stars – supernovae – near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. Professor Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark sets out his novel work in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When the…
The mystery of the origin of the strongest cosmic rays has deepened as new clues into key suspects, the most powerful explosions in the universe, suggest they are likely not potential culprits, researchers say. Cosmic rays are charged subatomic particles that streak to Earth from deep in outer space. A few rare cosmic rays are…
Widely accepted theories of dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts, expect the solar neighborhood to be filled with the stuff – but it isn’t, at least as far as can be detected. This extra ingredient in the cosmos was originally suggested to explain…
A new scientific instrument, a “time machine” of sorts, built by UCLA astronomers and colleagues, will allow scientists to study the earliest galaxies in the universe, which could never be studied before. MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer For Infra-Red Exploration) will gather spectra, which contain chemical signatures in the light of everything from stars to galaxies, at…
When middleweight stars near the end of their cosmic lives, they shrug off their outer layers, shedding up to half their mass. But just how the stars manage to dispel so much material has been a mystery, though a new study may hold clues to closing the case. Astronomers have found that dust grains in…
Some scientists are searching not just for any life out there in the universe, but for our distant relatives. Earth may have seeded life on other planets if an asteroid smacking into Earth sprayed DNA into space, researchers suggest. Now a team of researchers is searching for siblings of the sun — stars born from…
Though scientists have suspected for a while that a giant black hole lurks at the center of our galaxy, they still can’t say for sure it’s the explanation for the strange behavior observed there. Now researchers are closer than ever to being able to image this region and probe the physics at work – potentially…
There should be billions of habitable, rocky planets around the faint red stars of our Milky Way galaxy, a new study suggests. Though these alien planets are difficult to detect, and only a few have been discovered so far, they should be ubiquitous, scientists say. And some of them could be good candidates to host…
A large research team from two major astronomy surveys reports in a paper submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters that scientists detected the movement of distant galaxy clusters via the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (kSZ) effect, which has never before been seen. Now that it has been detected, the kSZ effect could prove to be an…