The ingredients for life are spread throughout the universe. While Earth is the only known place in the universe with life, detecting life beyond Earth is a major goal of modern astronomy and planetary science.
The violent death throes of a nearby star so thoroughly disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind—known as a white dwarf—is sucking in debris from both the system's inner and outer reaches, UCLA astronomers ...
NASA has indicated that 5,030 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,772 systems, with another 8,974 candidates awaiting confirmation. With next-generation instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) coming ...
What turned Venus into hell? It could have simply been a steadily warming sun, but new research suggests that volcanoes may have played a role in creating a runaway greenhouse effect. And the same history of active Volcanism ...
Around 56 million years ago, Earth's climate underwent a major climatic transition. A huge release of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere raised atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations—which meant temperatures going ...
If there are so many galaxies, stars, and planets, where are all the aliens, and why haven't we heard from them? Those are the simple questions at the heart of the Fermi Paradox. In a new paper, a pair of researchers ask ...
In an international collaboration, Earth scientists at the University of Cologne and Freie Universität Berlin have discovered that some magmas on Earth, which made their way through the deep terrestrial mantle and erupted ...
Michigan State University's Seth Jacobson and colleagues in China and France have unveiled a new theory that could help solve a galactic mystery of how our solar system evolved. Specifically, how did the gas giants—Jupiter, ...
Glaciers of carbon dioxide are moving, creating deposits kilometers thick today across the south polar region of Mars, something that could have been going on more than 600,000 years, a paper by Planetary Science Institute ...
Monash University, University of Queensland and Australian National University researchers have used ANSTO's Australian Synchrotron in their study of meteorites found on Earth that could be used in future to find evidence ...
