We Could See the Glint off Giant Cities on Alien Worlds
How large would an extraterrestrial city have to be for current telescopes to see it? Would it need to be…
JWST is Powerful Enough to See a Variety of Biosignatures in Exoplanets
According to a new study, JWST is powerful enough to detect the chemicals in the atmospheres of various terrestrial planets…
The Hidden Benefits of Large Science Projects
Large astronomical projects like the Dark Energy Survey and the James Webb Space Telescope provide innumerable benefits to society, like…
This Hot Jupiter is Leaving a Swirling Tail of Helium in its Wake
In a recent study published in Science Advances, a team of researchers commissioned the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET), which is designed…
Earth Might Have Formed in Just a Few Million Years
Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago. That simplistic statement is common, and it's a good starting point for understanding…
Pulsars Could Help Map the Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way
The BlackHoleCam project, part of the Event Horizon Telescope consortium, will use the powerful EHT array to search for pulsars…
A Planet So Hot Its Atmosphere Contains the Raw Material for Rocks
In the annals of "strange new worlds", the ultra-hot Jupiter planet WASP-76b ranks right up there as a very unusual…
How Science Fiction Sparked Our Flights to the Final Frontier
The commercial spaceflight revolution didn’t begin with Elon Musk. Or with Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson, or any of the…
Did Life Need Plate Tectonics to Emerge?
It's widely accepted that Earth's plate tectonics are a key factor in life's emergence. Plate tectonics allows heat to move…
Startup PLD Space to Launch Europe’s First Reusable Rocket
PLD Space could launch its suborbital Miura-1 rocket this month.