Will machine learning help us find extraterrestrial life?

When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, "if they're out there, why haven't we found them yet?" And often, the response is that we have ...

Astronomers measure nearby Universe's 'cosmic fog'

Researchers from the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet (CNRS/École Polytechnique) have carried out the first measurement of the intensity of the diffuse extragalactic background light in the nearby Universe, a fog of photons ...

Spitzer telescope finds first objects burned furiously

(Phys.org) -- The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive ...

Astronomers explain why disk galaxies eventually look alike

(Phys.org) —It happens to all kinds of flat, disk galaxies – whether they're big, little, isolated or crowded in a cluster. They all grow out of their irregular, clumped appearance and their older stars take on the same ...

A hidden treasure in the Large Magellanic Cloud

(Phys.org)—Nearly 200 000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space, in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. Vast clouds of gas within it slowly collapse ...

The stellar superhighway in the Milky Way

Conventional wisdom suggests that, like planets round the Sun, stars follow approximately circular orbits which cross the spiral arms, and that the Sun presently lies in a spur rather than a major spiral arm.

Elements of ExoPlanets

By looking at the wavelengths of light from nearby stars, researchers have determined the abundance of certain elements for more than a hundred stars. Trace elements in such stars may influence their habitable zones, where ...

Hubble catches the moment the lights went out

(Phys.org)—The further away you look, the further back in time you see. Astronomers use this fact to study the evolution of the Universe by looking at nearby and more distant galaxies and comparing their features. Hubble ...

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