Venus Might Have Had Plate Tectonics Just Like Earth
Even though Venus is very similar to Earth in many ways, it's a hell-world with a runaway greenhouse effect. It…
What’s the Best Way to Find Planets in the Habitable Zone?
Despite the fact that we've discovered thousands of them, exoplanets are hard to find. And some types are harder to…
Everything in the Universe Fits in This One Graph. Even the Impossible Stuff
The Universe has physical constants, such as the force of gravity that define everything. If these constants were any different,…
The Milky Way's Black Hole is Spinning as Fast as it Can
Is the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way (SagA*) spinning? And how fast? It's tricky to…
JWST Confirms the Formation of Heavy Elements in a Kilonova
A recent study published in Nature investigates recent observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and ground-based telescopes of…
What a Mess. When the Milky Way and Andromeda Merge, it'll Look Like This
No need to panic, but the Andromeda Galaxy is barreling towards us. It is due to begin merging with the…
JWST Takes a Detailed Look at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede
Nature doesn't conform to our ideas of neatly-contained categories. Many things in nature blur the lines we try to draw…
Mars Still Has Liquid Rock Near its Core
Why doesn’t Mars have a magnetic field? If it did, the planet would be protected from cosmic radiation and charged…
An Exo-Neptune Beat the Odds and Kept its Atmosphere
As planet-hunting scientists find more and more planets, they've encountered some puzzles. One of them concerns the lack of Neptune-size…
What’s Inside the Carina Pillars? Massive Protostars and Newly-Forming Planets!
Star-forming nebulae are busy places. Unfortunately, clouds of gas and dust usually hide the action. To cut through the dust…