Category Astronomy/Space

A new study shows that planets bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune are common outside the Solar System.

An international team including astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has announced the discovery of a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting its star farther out than Saturn is to the sun.

These results are another examp...

Scientists and space explorers have been on the hunt to determine where and how much ice is present on the Moon. Water ice would be an important resource at a future lunar base, as it could be used to support humans or be broken down to hydrogen and oxygen, key components of rocket fuel. University of Hawai’i at Manoa researchers are using two innovative approaches to advance the search for ice on the Moon.

ShadowCam scouts for surface ice

Water ice was previously detected in the permanently shaded regions of the Moon’s north and south poles by Shuai Li, assistant researcher at the Hawai’i Institute o...

By analyzing the available observational data, astronomers from the Tribhuvan University in Nepal and elsewhere have investigated the properties of a compact dwarf galaxy designated SDSS J134313.15+364457.5 (or J1343+3644 for short). As a result, they found that J1343+3644 will evolve into a compact elliptical galaxy.

The new finding is reported in a paper published April 14 on the arXiv pre-print server.

In general, dwarf galaxies are the most numerous in the universe when compared to other galaxies but are difficult to detect due to their low luminos...

Who knew that magnetic fields could be so useful? Astronomers are able to use magnetic fields to map our environment within the Milky Way using a technique called Faraday rotation.

It works like this. There’s a bunch of dust—literal dust grains—floating within the galaxy.

Well, I say there’s a lot of dust, but it’s at very, very low densities. Thankfully, the volumes within interstellar space are so vast that the total amount of dust can really add up. And all these little dust grains have little magnetic fields associated with them, because all the grains are made of electric charges and they’re spinning around themselves.

When light from distant sources passes through the dust, that light encounters all these little magnetic fields...