Category Astronomy/Space

Researchers from Western have shown that a fireball that originated at the edge of the solar system was likely made of rock, not ice, challenging long-held beliefs about how the solar system was formed.

Just at the edge of our solar system and halfway to the nearest stars is a collection of icy objects sailing through space, known as the Oort Cloud. Passing stars sometimes nudge these icy travelers towards the sun, and we see them as comets with long tails. Scientists have yet to observe any objects in the Oort Cloud directly, but everything detected so far coming from its direction has been made of ice.

Theoretically, the very basis of understa...

Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to...

New research sheds light on how the “hell planet” got so devilishly hot and how other worlds might become too toasty for life. That rocky world, 55 Cnc e (nicknamed “Janssen”), orbits its star so closely that a year lasts just 18 hours, its surface is a giant lava ocean, and its interior may be chock-full of diamond.

The fresh insights come thanks to a new tool called EXPRES that captured ultra-precise measurements of the starlight shining from Janssen’s sun, known as Copernicus or 55 Cnc...

On Dec. 11, 2021, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a blast of high-energy light from the outskirts of a galaxy around 1 billion light-years away. The event has rattled scientists’ understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful events in the universe.

For the last few decades, astronomers have generally divided GRBs into two categories...