What Does the Milky Way Look Like?
A team from the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) has revealed a new picture of the Milky Way’s morphology.
What Can Be Done to Help Astronaut Vision in Space?
A new study by a team of Australian researchers has led to a non-invasive way to test astronauts for changes in eyesight.
Planets Might Protect their Water Until their Star Settles Down
Creating rocky planets is a messy, dangerous, hot business. Planetesimals accrete together, which creates heat and pressure on the newborn world. The nearby adolescent star bombards them with intense radiation. That likely “bakes off” any surface oceans, lakes, or rivers, which is a disaster if you’re looking for places where life might arise or exist. …
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Blue Straggler Stars are Weird
All stars follow a particular path in their lives once they start fusing hydrogen. As they live they steadily get brighter and hotter until they turn to fusing other elements. Every star follows this exact same path…except the blue straggler stars.
A Star Came too Close to a Black Hole. It Didn’t End Well
Black holes are confounding objects that stretch physics to its limits. The most massive ones lurk in the centers of large galaxies like ours. They dominate the galactic center, and when a star gets too close, the black hole’s powerful gravitational force tears the star apart as they feed on it. Not even the most …
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Black Holes Shouldn’t be Able to Merge, but Dozens of Mergers Have Been Detected. How Do They Do It?
Who knows what lurks in the hearts of some globular clusters? Astronomers using a collection of gravitational wave observatories found evidence of collections of smaller black holes dancing together as binaries in the hearts of globulars. What’s more, they’ve detected an increased number of gravitational wave events when some of these stellar-mass black holes crashed …
Want to Colonize Space? Unleash the Power of Microbes
If space colonization is in our future, we’ll have to use the resources available there. But we won’t be able to bring our established industrial methods and processes from Earth into space. Transporting heavy mining machinery to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else in space is not feasible. And each of those environments is wildly …
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With JWST Fully Operational Again, we get Images Like This: Saturn’s Moon Titan
The James Webb’s mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) is back online, and took a new image of Saturn’s largest moon Titan!
We’ll Inevitably see Another Interstellar Object. Which Ones Make the Best Targets to Visit?
We finally have the technological means to detect interstellar objects. We’ve detected two in the last few years, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, and there are undoubtedly more out there. As such, there’s been a lot of interest in developing a mission that could visit one once we detect it. But what would such a mission look …
Maybe We Don’t See Aliens Because Nobody Wants to Come Here
The Fermi Paradox won’t go away. It’s one of our most compelling thought experiments, and generations of scientists keep wrestling with it. The paradox pits high estimates for the number of civilizations in the galaxy against the fact that we don’t see any of those civs. It says that if rapidly expanding civilizations exist in …
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