Lava worlds, massive exoplanets home to sparkling skies and roiling volcanic seas called magma oceans, are distinctly unlike the planets in our solar system.
In 1960, Freeman Dyson proposed how advanced civilizations could create megastructures that enclosed their system, allowing them to harness all of their star's energy and multiplying the habitable space they could occupy. ...
The ESA launched Gaia in 2013 with one overarching goal: to map more than one billion stars in the Milky Way. Its vast collection of data is frequently used in published research. Gaia is an ambitious mission, though it seldom ...
The race is on to discover truly habitable Earth-like worlds. While we are starting to observe the atmospheres of large potentially habitable planets such as Hycean worlds with the telescopes we currently have, the most significant ...
When you launch humanity's most powerful telescope, you expect results. The JWST has delivered excellent results by detecting ancient galaxies, identifying chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres, and peering into star-forming ...
Birds descended from theropod dinosaurs by the Late Jurassic, but our understanding of the earliest evolution of the Avialae, the clade comprising all modern birds but not Deinonychus or Troodon, has been hampered by a limited ...
If we're going to look for life on other worlds, why not start with the one planet we know has life? Earth's atmosphere is rich with oxygen and molecules such as methane, which strongly suggest the presence of life. It also ...
Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new massive and dense exoplanet. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-332 b, is one of the densest Neptune-sized ...
Have you ever heard of the Jehol Biota, a diverse assemblage of plants and animals during the Mesozoic Era that lived in what is now northern China? The Jehol Biota, which includes the earliest known flowering plants, feathered ...
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the MPIA-led MINDS research collaboration discovered water in the inner region of a disk of gas and dust around the young star PDS 70. Astronomers expect terrestrial planets to be forming ...
