Observing distant objects is no easy task, thanks to our planet's thick and fluffy atmosphere. As light passes through the upper reaches of our atmosphere, it is refracted and distorted, making it much harder to discern objects ...
Astronomy
Nov 27, 2023
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Astronomers get to ask some of the most fundamental questions there are, ranging from whether we're alone in the cosmos to what the nature of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter making up most of the universe is.
Astronomy
Nov 9, 2023
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Astronomers have found plenty of white dwarf stars surrounded by debris disks. Those disks are the remains of planets destroyed by the star as it evolved. But they've found one intact Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a white ...
Astronomy
Nov 2, 2023
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The 11-year solar activity cycle is a well-known phenomenon, during which the intensity of the sun's magnetic field varies and its polarities reverse. Over the past 30 years, astronomers have identified similar behavior in ...
Astronomy
Oct 25, 2023
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Earth is our only example of a habitable planet, so it makes sense to search for Earth-size worlds when we're hunting for potentially-habitable exoplanets. When astronomers found seven of them orbiting a red dwarf star in ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 23, 2023
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In searching for life in the universe, a field known as astrobiology, scientists rely on Earth as a template for biological and evolutionary processes. This includes searching for Earth analogs, rocky planets that orbit within ...
Astrobiology
Oct 19, 2023
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As of October 2023, astronomers have discovered 5,506 exoplanets orbiting other stars. That number is growing daily, and astronomers are hoping, among other things, to find Earth-like worlds. But will we know one when we ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 6, 2023
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As we began to discover hundreds, then thousands of exoplanets, we found that there were two types of worlds unlike anything in our solar system. The first are super-Earths. These worlds straddle the line between large rocky ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 5, 2023
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5
A study, released on the pre-print server arXiv, examines how the Earth was hit by blasts from supernovae (plural form of supernova (SN)) that occurred 3 million years ago (Mya) and 7 Mya with the goal of ascertaining the ...
Astronomy
Oct 2, 2023
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The ESA launched Gaia in 2013 with one overarching goal: to map more than one billion stars in the Milky Way. Its vast collection of data is frequently used in published research. Gaia is an ambitious mission, though it seldom ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 26, 2023
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