Category Astronomy/Space

An artist’s impression of a stellar system with three super-Earths. Credit: Courtesy of ESO

A star about 100 light years away in the Pisces constellation, GJ 9827, hosts what may be one of the most massive and dense super-Earth planets detected to date, according to new research led by Carnegie’s Johanna Teske. This new information provides evidence to help astronomers better understand the process by which such planets form. The GJ 9827 star actually hosts a trio of planets, discovered by NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler/K2 mission, and all three are slightly larger than Earth. This is the size that the Kepler mission determined to be most common in the galaxy with periods between a few and several-hundred-days.

Intriguingly, no planets of this size exist in our Solar System...

Diverse mineralogy exhumed from the Martian subsurface: A false color image from the HiRISE instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows amazing diversity of rocks exhumed from the Martian subsurface a meteor impact in the Nili Fossae area. The image is 1 km across. This site and others like it contain rocks that were altered by fluids in the Martian crust billions of years ago, at the time when life first emerged on Earth. These rocks represent exploration targets that could teach us about the origin of life. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

However, possibilities for subsurface life may be more promising. Below the surface, hydrothermal systems on Mars may have provided the right environment for life on the Red Planet, researchers argue. For the last 2...

This is an X-ray image of the Perseus galaxy cluster, approximately 240 million light-years away from Earth. The x-ray radiation emitted by galaxies and galaxy clusters still poses numerous puzzles to astrophysicists. In particular, it may provide clues to the nature of the mysterious dark matter. Credit: NASA

Physicists propose a new theory of dark matter based on the detection of unusual x-ray radiation from galaxies. It implies that dark matter particles may be very different from what is normally assumed. In particular, their theory involves dark matter particles which are extremely light – almost 100X lighter than electrons, in stark contrast to many conventional models that involve very heavy dark matter particles instead.

According to common theory, dark matter must exist because ot...

The result shows the presence of a reinforced multilayer magnetic cage (orange and pink) in which the magnetic rope (blue) develops during the last hours before the eruption. Credit: © Tahar Amari et al. / Centre de physique théorique (CNRS/École Polytechnique).

Just one phenomenon may underlie all solar eruptions, according to researchers from the CNRS, École Polytechnique, CEA and INRIA. They have identified the presence of a confining ‘cage’ in which a magnetic rope forms, causing solar eruptions. It is the resistance of this cage to the attack of the rope that determines the power and type of the upcoming flare...