The discovery of the first alien planet with two suns — like the “Star Wars” world Tatooine — residing in its parent star’s habitable zone is good news for the search for life beyond Earth, scientists say. The planet, known as Kepler-47c, is a gas giant and therefore probably not suitable for life as we…
To build a planet you need lots of rubble and that means lots of heavy elements – stuff more massive than atoms of hydrogen and helium. The elemental composition of the collapsing nebula that gave birth to the Sun and the planets of the Solar System included things like iron, silicon and magnesium that form…
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has led to a bonanza of newfound supermassive black holes and extreme galaxies. Images from the telescope have revealed millions of dusty black hole candidates across the universe and about 1,000 even dustier objects thought to be among the brightest galaxies ever found. These powerful galaxies that burn…
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the right…
What ever happened to the Goldilocks planet? It was big news back in September 2010 when a group led by Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science said they had discovered a small planet circling a small red star in the constellation…
Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey. Or so an intergalactic photo finish may suggest. Physicist Robert Nemiroff reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that were recorded by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009. The photons originated about 7 billion light…
The start of the universe should be modeled not as a Big Bang but more like water freezing into ice, a team of theoretical physicists report. As reported in the journal Physical Review D, the researchers from the University of Melbourne and RMIT University suggest that by investigating the cracks and crevices common to all…
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently observed two clusters full of massive stars that appear to be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are located some 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way. What at first was thought to be only one cluster in…
The newly discovered Phoenix cluster may be one of the most extreme objects ever observed, being among the most massive, luminous, and productive clusters in the universe. Located about 5.7 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, it has a mass roughly 2,500 trillion times that of the sun. Distributed between the galaxies in…
Scientists taking advantage of the versatility and new capabilities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, have observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons, from the seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons…