A giant mirror to create "sunlight on demand" was just approved by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), despite opposition from astronomers and the public, and real safety concerns.
Space Exploration
Jul 13, 2026
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The planets that appear most common in the universe could have a lot of water—but it could be hiding where telescopes can't detect it, according to a new study led by scientists with the University of Chicago.
Astronomy
Jul 13, 2026
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26
After decades of analyzing reams of lunar rocks back here on Earth, the canonical view of the moon was that it was anhydrous; that it had extraordinarily little water. That all began to change in 2009 with new data from NASA's ...
Planetary Sciences
Jul 13, 2026
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13
An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The newfound alien world, designated NGTS-39 b, is a Jupiter-sized ...
Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms of ...
Astronomy
Jul 10, 2026
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403
Ever so slightly bigger than Earth, the exoplanet LHS 3844b orbits its parent star, LHS 3844, a red dwarf 48.5 light-years from our solar system. Its rotational speed mirrors its orbital speed. The result? One side of LHS ...
Astrobiology
Jul 10, 2026
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95
Sub-Neptunes are the most common type of planet in our galaxy. Bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, these worlds remain deeply mysterious because scientists still do not know what they are made of. What astronomers ...
Astronomy
Jul 10, 2026
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There's a bit of a historical mystery surrounding the star Theta Eridani. Ptolemy in the second century A.D. and al-Sufi in A.D. 964 both recorded Theta Eridani as one of the 13 brightest stars in the sky. Hipparchus may ...
Astronomy
Jul 10, 2026
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98
This close-up view shows fragments of sulfur crystals, the first ever seen on the Red Planet.
Planetary Sciences
Jul 9, 2026
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66
The young planetary system of the 23-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris (short: Beta Pic) is regarded as an iconic circumstellar dust disk, which hosts at least three giant gas planets. Discovered in 2008 by direct imaging, ...
Planetary Sciences
Jul 9, 2026
0
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