Category Astronomy/Space

This graphic shows where a planet can be habitable and warm around our sun, as it ages over billions of years. Credit: Cornell University

The oldest detected Kepler planets (exoplanets found using Kepler telescope) are ~11 billion years old, and the planetary diversity suggests that around other stars, such initially frozen worlds could be the size of Earth and could even provide habitable conditions once the star becomes older. Astronomers usually looked at middle-aged stars like our sun, but to find habitable worlds, one needs to look around stars of all ages.

In their work, Ramses M...

Birthplace of the suns: The integral-shaped filament, the two star clusters above the filament, and cloud L1641 in the south can be seen on these images of the Orion A star formation region. The picture on the left shows a density map compiled with data from the Herschel space telescope, the one on the right an infrared image taken by the WISE space telescope. The photo in the centre is a combination of both images. Credit: A. M. Stutz / MPIA

Space bears witness to a constant stream of star births. And whole star clusters are often formed at the same time – and within a comparatively short period. Amelia Stutz and Andrew Gould from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg have proposed a new mechanism to explain this quick formation...

MIT scientists say that the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), a period that scientists believe marked the beginning of oxygen’s permanent presence in the atmosphere, started as early as 2.33 billion years ago.

Today, 21% of the air we breathe is made up of molecular oxygen. But this gas was not always in such ample, life-sustaining supply, and in fact was largely absent from the atmosphere for the first 2 billion years of Earth’s history. When, then, did oxygen first accumulate in the atmosphere? MIT team reports that the Earth’s atmosphere experienced the first significant, irreversible influx of oxygen as early as 2.33 billion years ago. This period marks the start of the Great Oxygenation Event, which was followed by further increases later in Earth’s history.

The scientists have also de...

NASA’s Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex

The discovery, made using the largest antenna of NASA’s Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex (70m diameter), could help scientists to understand more about the history of this important element. Helium-3 is a gas that has the potential to be used as a fuel in nuclear fusion power plants in the future, and is crucial for use in cryogenics and medical imaging techniques. There is very little of it available on Earth, so most of it is manufactured in nuclear labs at great cost. There are thought to be significant supplies on the Moon, and several governments have signalled their intention to go to there to mine it, which could trigger a new space race.

The gas is produced in low mass stars, less than twice the mass of the Sun, which expel most...