Astrobiologists searching the heavens for extraterrestrial life have a simple motto: “Follow the water, ”says The Washington Post. Water is an essential ingredient in all earthly biochemistry, so scientists believe it’s logical to look for life first on planets and moons with liquid water.New data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft indicate that Enceladus, a tiny, ice-encrusted moon orbiting Saturn, may be […]
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Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]
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Two NASA probes that spent last year orbiting the moon have returned stunning new geological maps that could help explain how it, Earth, and other planets in our solar system formed. The probes, named Ebb and Flow, flew identical orbits just miles above the moon’s surface to measure its gravity field. Slight disruptions in their paths—caused by the push and […]
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Thanks to the Hubble space telescope, it is nearly impossible to unsee the huge glimmering region on the surface of Uranus. The cause of this blatant smear on Uranus is caused by powerful bursts of solar wind. Streams of charged particles caught in powerful magnetic fields forced into the upper atmosphere of Uranus, where their interactions with gas particles, such […]
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People always wonder how the moon was made. The birth of the planets 4.5 billion years ago was extremely violent. They grew to full size by absorbing rival planet embryos in a series of titanic collisions—one of which probably gave Earth its moon (below). The moon’s large size, low density, and other features suggest that it emerged from an explosion […]
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Astronomers have spotted the most enormous black holes ever detected, inspiring new theories about how such pockets of extreme gravity form. Together, the two objects, which are roughly 300 million light-years away, have more mass than 30 billion suns, University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma tells the Associated Press. “They are monstrous,” she says. The smaller of the […]
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When we see a magical light show from the sun it is called “stretched loops” that are visible when the sun is rotated showing its profile to the earth. These lights move along a magnetic line that shows us these yellow lights that are charged particles of ultraviolet light. In about 5 billion years the sun will shine its last […]
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Earth got off relatively easy last week after being hit by the biggest blast of solar radiation since 2005—but we may not be so lucky next time. Last week’s coronal mass ejection, in which a solar flare whipped an arc of magnetic particles toward Earth at 4 million mph, led some airlines to reroute flights away from the poles, where […]
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In its early days, Earth became hell. About 3.3 billion years ago, new research indicates, at least two massive asteroids 30 to 60 miles in diameter smashed into this planet, boiling the oceans and sending atmospheric temperatures soaring to an unimaginable 932 degrees Fahrenheit. Stanford University scientists have found evidence of this extreme era in a geological formation in South […]
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