Category Astronomy/Space

Rocky, Earth-like planets orbiting our closest stars could host life, according to a new study that raises the excitement about exoplanets. When rocky, Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of some of our closest stars, excitement skyrocketed – until hopes for life were dashed by the high levels of radiation bombarding those worlds.

Proxima-b, only 4.24 light years away, receives 250 times more X-ray radiation than Earth and could experience deadly levels of ultraviolet radiation on its surface...

For the first time scientists have been able to prove a decades old theory on stars thanks to a revolutionary high-speed camera. Scientists at the University of Sheffield have been working with HiPERCAM, a high-speed, multicolour camera, which is capable of taking more than 1,000 images per second, allowing experts to measure both the mass and the radius of a cool subdwarf star for the first time.

The findings published today (8 April 2019) in Nature Astronomy have allowed researchers to verify the commonly used stellar structure model – which describes the internal structure of a star in detail – and make detailed predictions about the brightness, the colour and its future evolution.

Scientists know that old stars have few...

A fragment of a planet that has survived the death of its star has been discovered by University of Warwick astronomers in a disc of debris formed from destroyed planets, which the star ultimately consumes. The iron and nickel rich planetesimal survived a system-wide cataclysm that followed the death of its host star, SDSS J122859.93+104032.9. Believed to have once been part of a larger planet, its survival is all the more astonishing as it orbits closer to its star than previously thought possible, going around it once every two hours.

The discovery, reported in the journal Science, is the first time that scientists have used spectroscopy to disc...

Scientists re-inspected 45-year-old Helios data, finding long trains of massive blobs – like lava lamp’s otherworldly bubbles, but 50 to 500 times the size of Earth – that ooze from the sun every 90 minutes or so. When Simone Di Matteo first saw the patterns in his data, it seemed too good to be true. “It’s too perfect!” Di Matteo, a space physics Ph.D. student at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, recalled thinking. “It can’t be real.” And it wasn’t, he’d soon find out.

Di Matteo was looking for long trains of massive blobs – like a lava lamp’s otherworldly bubbles, but anywhere from 50 to 500 times the size of Earth — in the solar wind...