Category Astronomy/Space

Scientists studying a nearby protostar have detected the presence of water in its circumstellar disk. The new observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) mark the first detection of water being inherited into a protoplanetary disk without significant changes to its composition. These results further suggest that the water in our Solar System formed billions of years before the Sun. The new observations are published today in Nature.

V883 Orionis is a protostar located roughly 1,305 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion...

As tragic as it is, engulfment of a planetary object by its stellar parent is a common scenario throughout the universe. But it doesn’t have to end in doom. A team of astrophysicists have used computer simulations to discover that planets can not only survive when their star eats them, but they can also drive its future evolution.

Models of the formation of planetary systems have shown that many planets often end up being consumed by their parent star. It’s simply a matter of orbital dynamics. Random interactions among newly forming planets and the protoplanetary disk that surrounds a young star can send planets on chaotic trajectories. Some of those trajectories end up driving the planet out of the system altogether, while other trajectories send them hurdling into the star.

An...

Experiment demonstrates solar system’s fragility. A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment.

UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science.

The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth...

The Big Bang may have not been alone. The appearance of all the particles and radiation in the universe may have been joined by another Big Bang that flooded our universe with dark matter particles. And we may be able to detect it.

In the standard cosmological picture the early universe was a very exotic place. Perhaps the most momentous thing to happen in our cosmos was the event of inflation, which at very early times after the Big Bang sent our universe into a period of extremely rapid expansion. When inflation ended, the exotic quantum fields that drove that event decayed, transforming themselves into the flood of particles and radiation that remain today.

When our universe was less than 20 minutes old, those particles began to assemble themselves into the first protons and ...