By Leonidas Papadopoulos, on February 27th, 2016
An artist’s concept of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). NASA has officially chosen the infrared-space telescope as the scientific successor to the James Webb Space Telescope, with a projected launch date around the 2024 timeframe. WFIRST is expected to make significant contributions in the study of dark energy and the characterisation […]
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By Paul Scott Anderson, on November 11th, 2015
Artist’s conception of GJ 1132b, an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting a nearby star. Conditions on this world, however, are probably more like Venus than Earth. Image Credit: Dana Berry
Astronomers have discovered another Earth-sized exoplanet that is the closest one to our own Solar System found so far, but it might not be a […]
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By Paul Scott Anderson, on August 29th, 2015
Does life spread through the galaxy like an infectious disease, with “bubbles” of inhabited planets? Image Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
We still don’t know if there is life elsewhere in the universe, but scientists are working on techniques to better understand how it may have originated anyway, in the event that such alien biology […]
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By Paul Scott Anderson, on July 24th, 2015 Artist’s conception of Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-sized exoplanet discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Image Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
One of the primary goals in the search for exoplanets is to, hopefully, find an Earth analog or “Earth twin,” an alien world similar to our own. That search is […]
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By Paul Scott Anderson, on April 29th, 2015 Illustration showing the central region of our galaxy as seen by NuSTAR (magenta circle). The smaller circle shows where the image was taken. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
It sounds like something from a bad sci-fi movie, but a NASA space telescope has detected what might be the X-ray “screams” from dead (zombie) stars. The […]
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By Paul Scott Anderson, on April 17th, 2015 Illustration depicting the life cycle of Sun-like stars. Billions of years from now, our own Sun will expand into a red giant star, scorching any life that exists. Image Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
Researchers at Cornell University are taking a new approach to the search for alien life: looking for habitable planets older than […]
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By Leonidas Papadopoulos, on April 13th, 2015 Artist’s impression of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the young star MWC 480. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, have detected the complex organic molecule methyl cyanide in the outer reaches of the star’s protoplanetary disk, where comets are believed to form. This discovery suggests that complex organic chemistry and potentially […]
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By Emily Carney, on April 1st, 2015 From HubbleSite: “This collage shows images of six different galaxy clusters taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The clusters were observed in a study of how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. Seventy-two large cluster collisions were studied in total. Using visible-light images from […]
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By Paul Scott Anderson, on January 17th, 2015 Cartoon illustration depicting how the three newly-found planets’ shadows (right side) can be seen as eclipses from Earth (left side) as they transit in front of their star. Image Credit: K. Teramura, UH IfA.
Last week was a good one for exoplanet enthusiasts, with yet more news relating to how other worlds are […]
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By Paul Scott Anderson, on September 24th, 2014 All-sky map of interstellar dust from Planck. Blue areas have less dust and red areas have more. The patch of sky observed by BICEP2 is not in one of the less dusty regions. Northern hemisphere is on the left and southern is on the right. Image Credit: ESA
As sometimes happens, the celebrations […]
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