A new study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope gives new insight into an important question: how habitable are planets that orbit the most common type of stars in the Galaxy? The target ...
Astronomy
Oct 30, 2020
4
436
Beyond the orbit of Neptune, a diverse collection of thousands of dwarf planets and other relatively small objects dwells in a region called the Kuiper Belt. These often-pristine leftovers from our solar system's days of ...
Astronomy
Oct 29, 2020
2
237
In 2015, the New Horizons space probe discovered spectacular snowcapped mountains on Pluto, which are strikingly similar to mountains on Earth. Such a landscape had never before been observed elsewhere in the Solar System. ...
Space Exploration
Oct 13, 2020
0
426
When stars like our sun die, all that remains is an exposed core—a white dwarf. A planet orbiting a white dwarf presents a promising opportunity to determine if life can survive the death of its star, according to Cornell ...
Astrobiology
Sep 16, 2020
4
392
Thanks to a bevy of telescopes in space and on Earth—and even a pair of amateur astronomers in Arizona—a University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer and his colleagues have discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting at ...
Astronomy
Sep 16, 2020
1
193
The dwarf planet Ceres—long believed to be a barren space rock—is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed Monday.
Astronomy
Aug 10, 2020
13
8844
Planetary scientist Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely and associates have reported for the first time how solid methane and nitrogen expand in response to temperature changes and resolved an historic ambiguity relating to the structure ...
Space Exploration
Aug 6, 2020
5
274
New detailed observations with NSF's NOIRLab facilities reveal a young exoplanet, orbiting a young star in the Hyades cluster, that is unusually dense for its size and age. Weighing in at 25 Earth-masses, and slightly smaller ...
Astronomy
Aug 4, 2020
12
925
In February of 2017, the scientific community rejoiced as NASA announced that a nearby star (TRAPPIST-1) had a system of no less than seven rocky planets. Since that time, astronomers have conducted all kinds of follow-up ...
Astronomy
Jul 17, 2020
0
127
With the help of citizen scientists, astronomers have discovered two highly unusual brown dwarfs, balls of gas that are not massive enough to power themselves the way stars do.
Astronomy
Jul 10, 2020
2
1248
