Category Astronomy/Space

The source of potentially hazardous solar particles, released from the Sun at high speed during storms in its outer atmosphere, has been located for the first time by researchers at UCL and George Mason University, Virginia, USA.

These particles are highly charged and, if they reach Earth’s atmosphere, can potentially disrupt satellites and electronic infrastructure, as well as pose a radiation risk to astronauts and people in airplanes. In 1859, during what’s known as the Carrington Event, a large solar storm caused telegraphic systems across Europe and America to fail. With the modern world so reliant on electronic infrastructure, the potential for harm is much greater.

To minimise the danger, scientists are seeking to understand how these streams of particles are produced so ...

That evidence is a set of advanced simulations based on observations of the rocky planet LHS 3844b, which is slightly larger than Earth. Importantly for this particular piece of research, it doesn’t look as though the exoplanet has an atmosphere.

That leaves half of LHS 3844b permanently exposed to its sun and could mean temperatures of up to roughly 800 degrees Celsius (1,472 degrees Fahrenheit) on the ‘daytime’ side, and about minus 250 degrees Celsius (minus 418 degrees Fahrenheit) on the ‘night-time’ side.”We thought that this severe temperature contrast might affect material flow in the planet’s interior,” says astronomer Tobias Meier, from the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Based on phase curve o...

A rocky planet discovered in the Virgo constellation could change how we look for life in the universe. It could be our best chance yet of studying rocky planet atmospheres outside the solar system, a new international study involving UNSW Sydney shows.

The planet, called Gliese 486b (pronounced Glee-seh), is a ‘super-Earth’: that is, a rocky planet bigger than Earth but smaller than ice giants like Neptune and Uranus. It orbits a red dwarf star around 26 light-years away, making it a close neighbour — galactically speaking.

With a piping-hot surface temperature of 430 degrees Celsius, Gliese 486b is too hot to support human life...

About 17 years ago, J. Martin Laming, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, theorized why the chemical composition of the Sun’s tenuous outermost layer differs from that lower down...