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Artist view of a planet orbiting two aging stars that exchange material and spiral closer together. Credit: Jon Lomberg

Planets that revolve around 2 suns may surprisingly survive the violent late stages of the stars’ lives, according to new research from NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre and York University. The finding is surprising because planets orbiting close to a single sun, like Mercury and Venus in our solar system, would be destroyed when the aging star swells into a red giant. The study found that planets orbiting binary stars, also referred to as circumbinary planets or “Tatooine worlds” after the iconic planetary home of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars – often escape death and destruction by moving out to wider orbits.

“This is very different from what will happen in our own solar ...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have demonstrated for the first time how an asteroid or comet could have caused the mega crater on Phobos without completely destroying the Martian moon. Credit: Image courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Mars’ largest moon Phobos has captured public imagination and been shrouded in mystery for decades. But numerical simulations recently conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shed some light on the enigmatic satellite. The dominant feature on the surface of Phobos (22-kilometers across) is Stickney crater (9-km across), a mega crater that spans nearly half the moon. The crater lends Phobos a physical resemblance to the planet-destroying Death Star in the film “Star Wars...

Illustration shows how a robot could assemble the trusses that would support a massive telescope mirror. Credit: Sergio Pellegrino/Caltech

Seeing deep into space requires large telescopes. The larger the telescope, the more light it collects, and the sharper the image it provides. Eg, NASA’s Kepler space observatory, with a mirror diameter of <1 meter, is searching for exoplanets orbiting stars up to 3,000 light-years away. By contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope, with a 2.4-meter mirror, has studied stars more than 10 billion light-years away.

Now Caltech’s Sergio Pellegrino and colleagues are proposing a space observatory that would have a primary mirror with a diameter of 100 meters – 40 times larger than Hubble’s...

Enhanced color image of Mercury. The bright, circular deposit in the upper center of the image is an enormous effusive volcanic deposit, situated within the largest impact crater on the planet, the Caloris basin. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab/Carnegie Institution of Washington

New research from North Carolina State University add insight into the geological evolution of Mercury in particular, and what happens when rocky planets cool and contract in general. There are two types of volcanic activity: effusive and explosive. Explosive volcanism is often a violent event that results in large ash and debris eruptions, such as the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980...