Category Astronomy/Space

Depiction of a world completely covered with ocean.
Credit: NASA Kepler Mission/Dana Berry

Scientists challenges idea that life requires ‘Earth clone’. The conditions for life surviving on planets entirely covered in water are more fluid than previously thought, opening up the possibility that water worlds could be habitable, according to a new paper from the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University.

The scientific community has largely assumed that planets covered in a deep ocean would not support the cycling of minerals and gases that keeps the climate stable on Earth, and thus wouldn’t be friendly to life. But the study, published Aug...

An image from NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite that shows an example of a commonly believed Slinky-like shaped coronal mass ejection (CME) — in this case a long filament of solar material hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, or corona. This CME traveled 900 miles per second connecting with Earth’s magnetic environment and causing aurora to appear four days later on Sept. 3, 2012.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

As the saying goes, everything old is new again. While the common phrase often refers to fashion, design, or technology, scientists at the University of New Hampshire have found there is some truth to this mantra even when it comes to research...

The Great Red Spot is the dark patch in the middle of this infrared image. It is dark due to the thick clouds that block thermal radiation. The yellow strip denotes the portion of the Great Red Spot used in astrophysicist Gordon L. Bjoraker’s analysis.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Gordon Bjoraker

One critical question has bedeviled astronomers for generations: Is there water deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and if so, how much? Gordon L. Bjoraker, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, reported in a recent paper in the Astronomical Journal that he and his team have brought the Jovian research community closer to the answer.

By looking from ground-based telescopes at wavelengths sensitive to thermal radiation leaking from the depths of Jupi...

ALMA revealed the distribution of molecular gas (left) and dust particles (right). In addition to the dense cloud in the center, the research team found two dense clouds several thousand light-years away from the center. These dense clouds are dynamically unstable and thought to be the sites of intense star formation. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Tadaki et al.

ALMA obtains most detailed view of distant starburst galaxy. Astronomers obtained the most detailed anatomy chart of a monster galaxy located 12.4 billion light-years away. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the team revealed that the molecular clouds in the galaxy are highly unstable, which leads to runaway star formation...