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Good Thing We Found this Earth-Sized Planet Now. It’s About to Be Destroyed

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of exoplanets with extremely small orbits around their stars. But what about exoplanets that get close enough to be devoured by their star, and what if it’s an Earth-sized exoplanet? This is what a recent study accepted to AAS Journals hopes to address as an international team of more than …

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Habitable Planet’s Orbiting Red Dwarf Suns Could at Risk from Far-Ultraviolet Radiation

The question of whether or not red dwarf stars can support habitable planets has been subject to debate for decades. With the explosion in exoplanet discoveries in the past two decades, the debate has become all the more significant. For starters, M-type (red dwarf) stars are the most common in the Universe, accounting for 75% …

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Fast-Tracking the Search for Habitable Worlds

Modern astronomy would struggle without AI and machine learning (ML), which have become indispensable tools. They alone have the capability to manage and work with the vast amounts of data that modern telescopes generate. ML can sift through large datasets, seeking specified patterns that would take humans far longer to find. The search for biosignatures …

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How Oumuamua Changes Our Perspective on Galactic Panspermia

Panspermia is an innately attractive idea that’s gained prominence in recent decades. Yet, among working scientists, it gets little attention. There are good reasons for their relative indifference, but certain events spark renewed interest in panspermia, even among scientists. The appearance of Oumuamua in our Solar System in 2017 was one of them.

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Mercury Could be Housing a Megafortune Worth of Diamonds!

Mercury, the closest planet to our Sun, is also one of the least understood in the Solar System. On the one hand, it is similar in composition to Earth and the other rocky planets, consisting of silicate minerals and metals differentiated between a silicate crust and mantle and an iron-nickel core. But unlike the other …

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The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Sets a Time Limit on the Formation of Life

The field of extrasolar planet studies has grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Thanks to missions like Kepler, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and other dedicated observatories, astronomers have confirmed 5,690 exoplanets in 4,243 star systems. With so many planets and systems available for study, scientists have been forced to reconsider many previously-held …

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Almost a Third of Early Galaxies Were Already Spirals

In the years before the JWST’s launch, astronomers’ efforts to understand the early Universe were stymied by a stubborn obstacle: the light from the early Universe was red-shifted to an extreme degree. The JWST was built with extreme redshifts in mind, and one of its goals was to study Galaxy Assembly. Once the JWST activated …

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