Two years after planetary scientists claimed they had discovered a large saltwater lake on Mars — a finding that, if accurate, significantly increases the possibility of life existing on that planet —...
Astronomy Week 2020
In honor of Astronomy Week, take a look back on the most exciting discoveries in our universe in the past year.
Adapted from "The Search for Life On Mars" by Elizabeth Howell and Nicholas Booth. Copyright 2020 by Arcade Publishing, Inc. In the late winter of 1995, two middle-aged NASA scientists, David McKay and...
On Monday, a group of scientists published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy revealing the presence of phosphine in Venus' upper atmosphere. The researchers spent three years attempting to find plausible...
The science world was rocked by the recent revelation that Venus could harbor simple life forms. In the relevant paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, researchers detail their discovery...
When looking around our solar system for bodies that could potentially harbor life, astrobiologists have generally focused on a few usual suspects: Mars, with its vast canyons, water deposits and mysterious...
It's hard to think about the climate crisis without feeling depressed for the future — and accordingly, most media coverage of humanity's rising carbon emissions trends towards gloomy predictions. An exception:...
When you think of a moon, you may think of a rocky, crater-filled barren surface with little to do besides wander about in your rover and collect rocks. While Earth’s moon is certainly the epitome of dead...
In a discovery that could transform our understanding of astronomy, an international team of astronomers reported on Wednesday that they believe an intact exoplanet is tightly orbiting a white dwarf, previously...
Astronomers have discovered the most massive black hole collision ever observed, and also the most distant, at 7 billion light years away — meaning it happened when our universe was only half its current...
The mysterious Nebra sky disk, a famous bronze artifact that depicts the cosmos, may not be as old as scholars once thought — and, therefore, may not actually prove that human beings were well-informed...
In early April, after nearly a month of being isolated in her cramped studio apartment, Kae Wood opened a package that changed the entire course of her summer. It was a Celestron 70mm portable telescope,...
The very calcium that makes up our teeth and bones originated from the final moments of dying stars. It's true; we are made of stardust. (Gives a whole new meaning to David Bowie's alter ego Ziggy Stardust!)...
Astronomers believe they have discovered a new, bizarre type of cosmic object that is invisible to all wavelengths of light except radio. The strange circular objects in question have been unofficially...
A new radio wave burst in space is capturing scientists' attention because of what it may tell us about its source. Known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), these signals have been one of the most perplexing...
Since 2001, astronomers have been aware of a massive star in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy, which is about 75 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius. Then, one day in 2019, it suddenly...
When it is raining hard on Earth, English speakers say it is raining cats and dogs. But on exoplanet WASP-76b, cats and dogs does not come close to describing its metallic precipitation. "One could say...
The bright night star Betelgeuse, which forms the right shoulder of the constellation Orion, may be just as erratic as Beetlejuice — except you don't have to say the star's name three times for the red...
Nearly 500 million light years away, a mysterious radio signal is repeating itself. It's a new piece in the puzzle of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — short bursts of radio waves that are so powerful that scientists...
As fans of 1980s English pop group Culture Club might quip, it's a comet chameleon. Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a local comet made famous when in 2014 the European Space Agency landed a small craft...
A new research paper published this month shines a light on a mystery in Antarctica that is perplexing physicists: high-energy neutrinos with an unknown origin. The odd properties of these outlier neutrinos...
Thirty years ago, no one knew if there were planets outside of our solar system. As astronomers figure out increasingly clever ways to observe even the tiniest (meaning Earth-size) planets in neighboring...
Just as astronomers thought they were making sense of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — the mysterious repeating signals originating deep in space — the universe threw us a curveball. A new paper published in...
One of the most luminous stars in the sky has been dimming in recent months, fueling some excited speculation that the massive star is fated to explode soon as a powerful supernova, one that would be from...
It turns out Titan isn’t the only moon in our solar system that has the key ingredients for life. Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa, has emerged as a contender, based on new research. Europa is one...
Science fiction can be oddly prescient. Though "Star Trek," "Star Wars," and "Lost In Space" all depicted life on other planets in distant solar systems, scientists had no evidence that there were any...
Those who follow astronomy know that a scientific debate has been brewing in the past decade over the existence of so-called Planet 9, a distant, massive planet in our very own solar system. The existence...
This piece originally appeared on The Conversation. Editor’s note: What started as an internet joke has generated a stern military warning after more than a million people “signed up” to “raid” Area 51...