Category Astronomy/Space

A European team of astronomers has discovered that dust particles around a star already coagulate before the star is fully grown. Dust particle growth is the first step in the formation of planets. The researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark publish their findings in Nature Astronomy.

In recent years, astronomers have discovered numerous planetary systems around other stars...

Read More

Some of the leading experts in the field, including a UC Riverside team of researchers, have written a major series of review papers on the past, present, and future of the search for life on other planets. Published in Astrobiology, the papers represent two years of work by the Nexus for Exoplanet Systems Science (NExSS), a NASA-coordinated research network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability, and by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.

Scientists have identified more than 3,500 exoplanets and many more will be discovered in the coming decades. Some of these are rocky, Earth-sized planets that are in the habitable zones of their stars, i.e. it’s neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water – and possibly life – to exist...

Read More

A new study found a way to determine whether the mysterious ‘star putty’ really exists. Researchers at the University of Bonn and the University of California at Irvine used sophisticated computer simulations to devise a test that could answer a burning question in astrophysics: is there really dark matter? Or does Newton’s gravitational law need to be modified? The new study, now published in the Physical Review Letters, shows that the answer is hidden in the motion of the stars within small satellite galaxies swirling around the Milky Way.

Using one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the scientists have si...

Read More

Clusters of stars across the vast reaches of time and space of the entire universe were all created the same way, researchers at McMaster University have determined. Researchers Corey Howard, Ralph Pudritz and William Harris used highly-sophisticated computer simulations to re-create what happens inside gigantic clouds of concentrated gases known to give rise to clusters of stars that are bound together by gravity.

The state-of-the-art simulations follow a cloud of interstellar gas 500 light years in diameter, projecting 5 million years’ worth of evolution wrought by turbulence, gravity and feedback from intense radiation pressure produced by massive stars within forming...

Read More