Category Astronomy/Space

Exoplanets are common in our galaxy, and some even orbit in the so-called habitable zone of their star. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been busy observing a few of these small, potentially habitable planets, and astronomers are now hard at work analyzing Webb data. We invite Drs...

Ever since aurora chasers discovered Steve, a mysterious ribbon of purple light in the night sky, scientists have wondered whether it might have a secret twin. Now, thanks to a photographer’s keen eye, and data from ESA’s Swarm satellites, we may have found it.

Steve was a sensation when scientists stumbled across it a few years ago, thanks to the eagle eyes and excellent photography of the Alberta Aurora Chasers Facebook group.

But its mauve hue and fleeting appearance meant it couldn’t be a feature of the aurora borealis, commonly known as the northern lights, which comes in shades of green, blue and red and can last for hours. So, what could it be?

Fortunately, ESA’s trio of magnetic-field monitoring Swarm satellites were...

An international team of astronomers has performed follow-up observations of a nearby alien world known as TOI-1685 b. Results of the observations, published May 21 on the pre-print server arXiv, indicate that TOI-1685 b is a hot and rocky alien world with an Earth-like density.

The so-called “super-Earths” are planets more massive than Earth but not exceeding the mass of Neptune...

Stars near the center of our galaxy are acting kind of weird. Dark matter may be the explanation. A team of scientific detectives (so to speak) have discovered a potential new class of stars that could exist within a light-year of the Milky Way’s center that could be operating according to an unusual mechanism: dark matter annihilation. This process would produce an outward pressure on the stars other than hydrogen fusion, keeping them from gravitationally collapsing—and making them essentially immortal, their youth being refreshed constantly...