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The Mechanics of Alien Waves One of the most dramatic and memorable scenes from Interstellar comes from Miller’s planet – and if you don’t want a spoiler for an 11 year old movie, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. When the crew arrives on this potential new home for humanity, they are faced with a literal 1.2 km high wall of water bearing down on them quickly. It’s a great representation of how waves on other planets can act differently than on Earth. Admittedly, according to Kip Thorne, the scientific advisor for that movie, those waves are actually caused by the planet’s proximityRead More →

Two Worlds Where the Sun Never Moves One side is scorched to over 200 degrees, while the other is plunged into a darkness so cold it falls below minus 200. Welcome to TRAPPIST-1b and 1c, two rocky worlds that have just revealed the first ever climate maps of Earth sized planets beyond our Solar System. The James Webb Space Telescope has been watching, and what it found tells us something profound about where life might, and might not exist in our Galaxy. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Stars Feeding our Galaxy’s Monster At the heart of our Galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of our Sun. For decades, astronomers have watched mysterious gas clouds drifting towards it on almost identical paths, wondering where they came from and why. Now, a team of researchers think they have finally cracked the puzzle and the answer involves two massive stars locked in a violent embrace! Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Exploding Stars, Black Holes, and the Forbidden Gap An international team led by Monash University has uncovered evidence of a rare form of exploding star, helping to shed light on one of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. At the end of their lives, most massive stars collapse into black holes—objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. But some are completely destroyed in pair-instability supernova explosions. This can explain the so-named “Forbidden Gap” in black hole masses. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

MSL Curiosity Found New Organic Chemicals On Mars, Proof That The Planet Can Preserve Ancient Biosignatures MSL Curiosity found 7 new organic molecules preserved in Martian sandstone. While they aren’t proof that life existed on Mars, they are important. They show that the planet is capable of protecting ancient biosignatures from radiation and preserving them in rock. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Tracking Changes in the Trifid Nebula With the Hubble Back in 1997, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the spectacular Trifid Nebula, a region of active star-formation. Now the telescope has revisited the Trifid. By comparing both images, astronomers have tracked some changes that tell them about how young stars behave and evolve. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Mars Didn’t Have Bathtubs, It Had Shelves Scientists have been debating for decades whether Mars once held a vast ocean covering a large part of its northern face. To prove the idea, they’ve been looking for a “bathtub ring” – a distinct, level shoreline that shows where water once stood. But, despite years of looking, they’ve only been able to find a very distorted potential shoreline whose height deviates by several kilometers – not exactly great evidence of a stable water level. But, according to a new paper in Nature from Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of CalTech, what scientists should have been looking forRead More →

Stellar Flares May Expand Habitable Zones Around Small Stars The search for life beyond Earth has traditionally focused on exoplanets orbiting Sun-like stars, which is a G-type star. However, low-mass stars, which are designated as K-type and M-type stars, have rapidly become a target for astrobiology, primarily due to their much longer lifetimes. This also means the habitable zone (HZ), which is the distance from a star where liquid water could exist, is much smaller than our solar system’s HZ, and is referred to as the liquid water habitable zone (LW-HZ). In contrast, another type of HZ that involves a star’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation potentiallyRead More →

Scientists Connect Sub-extreme Solar Outbursts to Tree Rings via Poetry As we make our way through the latest solar maximum period, scholars and scientists are looking to similar events in the past to learn more about ancient bouts of solar activity. In particular, they want to know more about solar proton events (SPEs). These outbursts of high-energy particles get triggered by flares and coronal mass ejections. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Which Types of Civilizations Collapse and Which Can Endure? New research examines 10 different types of global technological civilizations, how they govern themselves, how they use resources, and other factors, to determine which types may endure and which may be doomed to collapse. Simulations show that resource use plays the key role. The simulations also show which types of detectable technosignatures each may generate. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →