Category Astronomy/Space

Some of the extremely low-density, “cotton candy like” exoplanets called super-puffs may actually have rings, according to new research published in The Astronomical Journal by Carnegie’s Anthony Piro and Caltech’s Shreyas Vissapragada

Super-puffs are notable for having exceptionally large radii for their masses – which would give them seemingly incredibly low densities...

Betelgeuse has been the center of significant media attention lately. The red supergiant is nearing the end of its life, and when a star over 10 times the mass of the Sun dies, it goes out in spectacular fashion. With its brightness recently dipping to the lowest point in the last hundred years, many space enthusiasts are excited that Betelgeuse may soon go supernova, exploding in a dazzling display that could be visible even in daylight.

While the famous star in Orion’s shoulder will likely meet its demise within the next million years—practically couple days in cosmic time—scientists maintain that its dimming is due to th...

Astronomers have found an exoplanet more than twice the size of Earth to be potentially habitable, opening the search for life to planets significantly larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

A team from the University of Cambridge used the mass, radius, and atmospheric data of the exoplanet K2-18b and determined that it’s possible for the planet to host liquid water at habitable conditions beneath its hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The results are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The exoplanet K2-18b, 124 light-years away, is 2.6 times the radius and 8...

A new study identifies a transition in the strong nuclear force that illuminates the structure of a neutron star’s core. Most ordinary matter is held together by an invisible subatomic glue known as the strong nuclear force – one of the four fundamental forces in nature, along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak force. The strong nuclear force is responsible for the push and pull between protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus, which keeps an atom from collapsing in on itself.

In atomic nucl...