Finding life beyond our solar system is a major goal of modern astronomy. NASA's planned Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to take direct images of Earth-sized planets around stars other than our sun. This task, however, ...
Billions of years ago, environmental conditions on Mars were significantly more hospitable than they are today. Our neighboring planet was likely warm, humid and surrounded by a dense atmosphere. Whether simple microorganisms ...
It's 2158, and you're chugging away on your Ph.D. in planetary volcanology from the University of Utopia Planitia on Mars. Graduate students still get paid a sub-living wage, so you've been stuck eating freeze-dried ramen ...
The European Space Agency's Mars Express has captured part of Mars's Mamers Valles, a fascinating valley system speckled with brief, tornado-like whirlwinds known as dust devils.
A team of scientists has used NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar and the U.S. National Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT) to carry out the most extensive radar study to date of Europa, the ocean world orbiting ...
New research led by a scientist at IPAC—a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech—studying the hot Jupiter CoRoT-2 b has settled on one of the three leading hypotheses explaining why its ...
Italian astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to perform polarimetric observations of the star WRAY 15-1880 and its young circumstellar disk. Results of the new observations, presented June 10 on the arXiv ...
There's a question at the heart of SETI that doesn't get nearly enough attention. It isn't whether aliens exist, and it isn't whether we have the technology to detect them. It's a far more practical problem: With a billion ...
Astronomers have investigated a puzzling binary star system in which two stars that may have formed together now show dramatically different chemical compositions. The new study, uploaded to the arXiv preprint server on May ...
Astronomers have found some of the strongest evidence yet that stars can swallow their own planets. A new study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, supports the long-held belief that young stars ...
