We all know Earth is special, but we may not fully appreciate how good we have it on this planet. Unlike its planetary neighbors, Earth has remained habitable for billions of years thanks to a complicated, ever-changing dance ...
Frank Herbert's Dune is epic sci-fi storytelling with an environmental message at its heart. The novels and movies are set on the desert planet of Arrakis, which various characters dream of transforming into a greener world—much ...
In 2008, astronomers with the SuperWASP survey spotted WASP-12b as it transited in front of its star. At the time, it was part of a new class of exoplanets ("hot Jupiters") discovered a little more than a decade before. However, ...
In 1999, Michelle Nichols saw her first total solar eclipse on a cruise in the Black Sea. It would be many years before she witnessed another one during a visit to southern Illinois in 2017.
In July of 2023, retired commander in the U.S. Navy David Fravor testified to the House Oversight Committee about a mysterious, Tic Tac-shaped object that he and three others observed over the Pacific Ocean in 2004. The congressional ...
Jupiter is our solar system's undisputed king of the planets. Jupiter is bright and easy to spot from our vantage point on Earth, helped by its massive size and banded, reflective cloud tops. Jupiter even possesses moons ...
Trappist-1 is a fascinating exoplanetary system. Seven worlds orbiting a red dwarf star just 40 light-years away. All of the worlds are similar to Earth in mass and size, and three or four of them are potentially habitable. ...
Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances—in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to orbit their suns have no ...
The study of "exoplanets," the sci-fi-sounding name for all planets in the cosmos beyond our own solar system, is a fairly new field. Mainly, exoplanet researchers like those in the ExoLab at the University of Kansas use ...
In several billion years, our sun will become a white dwarf. What will happen to Jupiter and Saturn when the sun transitions to become a stellar remnant? Life could go on, though the giant planets will likely drift further ...
