Category Astronomy/Space

Every clear night for the last three weeks, Bob Stephens has pointed his home telescope at the same two stars in hopes of witnessing one of the most violent events in the universe—a nova explosion a hundred thousand times brighter than the sun.

The eruption, which scientists say could happen any day now, has excited the interest of major observatories worldwide, and it promises to advance our understanding of turbulent binary star systems.

Yet for all the high-tech observational power that NASA and other scientific institutions can muster, astrophysicists are relying on countless amateur astronomers like Stephens to spot the explosion first.

The reason? It’s just too costly to keep their equipment focused on the same subject for months at a ...

Almost 55 years after the launch of Apollo 11—the first mission to land humans on the moon—scientists have found evidence of a large cave system near the landing site of those astronauts.

Using radar images taken by Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft in 2010, researchers have been able to determine that huge pits, found in images of the moon, may in fact be “skylights” to large caves and tunnels that sit beneath the lunar surface.

These could be incredibly valuable to future astronauts hoping to settle on the moon, acting as a convenient shelter for a lunar base.

The cave is accessible through a pit in the well-studied Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility)...

Interest in Earth-like planets orbiting within the habitable zone of their host stars has surged, driven by the quest to discover life beyond our solar system. But the habitability of such planets, known as exoplanets, is influenced by more than just their distance from the star.

A new study by Rice University’s David Alexander and Anthony Atkinson extends the definition of a habitable zone for planets to include their star’s magnetic field...

Researchers have found a link between some of the largest and smallest objects in the cosmos: supermassive black holes and dark matter particles.

Their new calculations reveal that pairs of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) can merge into a single larger black hole because of previously overlooked behavior of dark matter particles, proposing a solution to the longstanding “final parsec problem” in astronomy.

The research is described in ...