The search for life beyond Earth starts in habitable zones, the regions around stars where conditions could potentially allow liquid water – which is essential for life as we know it – to pool on a planet's surface. New ...
Astronomy
Feb 8, 2017
5
635
Is there anybody out there? The question of whether Earthlings are alone in the universe has puzzled everyone from biologists and physicists to philosophers and filmmakers. It's also the driving force behind San Francisco ...
Astronomy
Jan 19, 2017
2
3910
The last two decades have seen an explosion of detections of exoplanets, as the sensitivity to smaller planets has dramatically improved thanks especially to the Kepler mission. These discoveries have found that the frequency ...
Astronomy
Jan 18, 2017
1
469
ESO has signed an agreement with the Breakthrough Initiatives to adapt the Very Large Telescope instrumentation in Chile to conduct a search for planets in the nearby star system Alpha Centauri. Such planets could be the ...
Astronomy
Jan 9, 2017
1
15
The achievements of astrophysicists this year were as groundbreaking as they were varied. From reuniting a lander with a mothership on a comet, to seeing the most extreme cosmic events with gravitational waves, 2016 was truly ...
Astronomy
Dec 28, 2016
2
1622
Microscopic organisms could survive at above the surface of planets and so-called brown dwarfs, whose terrain and lower atmospheres are inhospitable, scientists have found.
Astronomy
Dec 13, 2016
1
12
Przewalski's horse, a species of wild horse that has been successfully reintroduced to the Gobi Desert, shares its pasture grounds with wild asses and free-roaming domestic horses. A scarce supply of food could lead to food ...
Ecology
Nov 30, 2016
0
5
Red dwarf stars have proven to be a treasure trove for exoplanet hunters in recent years. In addition to multiple exoplanets candidates being detected around stars like TRAPPIST-1, Gliese 581, Gliese 667C, and Kepler 296, ...
Astronomy
Nov 11, 2016
0
14
Computer simulations of the formation of planets orbiting in the habitable zones of low mass stars such as Proxima Centauri by astrophysicists at the University of Bern show that these planets are most likely to be roughly ...
Astronomy
Oct 25, 2016
2
102
In August astronomers announced that the nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (called Proxima b) in its habitable zone. At first glance, Proxima Centauri seems nothing like our Sun. It's a small, cool, ...
Astronomy
Oct 11, 2016
9
1
