Category Astronomy/Space

In this artist’s concept, X-ray and extreme ultraviolet light from a young red dwarf star cause ions to escape from an exoplanet’s atmosphere. Scientists have developed a model that estimates the oxygen ion escape rate on planets around red dwarfs, which plays an important role in determining an exoplanet’s habitability. (screen shot from video) Credit: NASA Goddard/Conceptual Image Lab; Michael Lentz, animator/Genna Duberstein, producer

The search for life beyond Earth starts in habitable zones could potentially allow liquid water to pool on a planet’s surface. New NASA research suggests some of these zones might not actually be able to support life due to frequent stellar eruptions from young red dwarf stars...

Rendering of part of a planetary system in orbit around a white dwarf star (the white spot at the center of the red ring). The foreground shows rocky asteroids; the red ring represents the rocky debris that remains of former asteroids or a minor planet that have already been broken apart by the strong gravity of the white dwarf. Credit: University of Warwick

Object in the constellation Boötes with C, H, O, N. Many scientists believe the Earth was dry when it first formed, and that the building blocks for life on our planet – carbon, nitrogen and water – appeared only later as a result of collisions with other objects in our solar system that had those elements...

Kinematic Clues to Bar Evolution for Galaxies in the Local Universe: Why the Fastest Rotating Bars are Rotating Most Slowly. The Astrophysical Journal, 2017; 835 (2): 279 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/835/2/279

Fastest spinning bars are rotating most slowly because of dark matter. Why do the majority of astronomers believe in dark matter: matter whose composition is unknown but which seems to make up 80% of the mass of the galaxies? The concept was invented in the 1930’s by Fritz Zwicky who used it to explain why the galaxies in the Coma cluster are moving much more quickly than can be explained in terms of their known masses...

Pale white veils and the narrow bridge between the clouds represent the distribution of the RR Lyrae stars. Credit: V Belokurov, D Erkal, A Mellinger

The Magellanic Clouds, the 2 largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, appear to be connected by a bridge stretching across 43,000 light years, according to an international team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of Cambridge. The discovery is based on the Galactic stellar census being conducted by the European Space Observatory, Gaia which scientists have been eagerly anticipating for 15 years. The first portion of information from the satellite was released 3 months ago and is freely accessible to everyone...