The search for habitable conditions beyond Earth has just become more interesting with the discovery on Saturn’s moon Enceladus of biologically available phosphorus. Phosphorus is the most elusive of the six crucial elements needed for life. In research published in Nature, data from the Cassini spacecraft were used to find phosphorus compounds called phosphates in ...
Impact craters happen on every solid body in the Solar System. In fact, it is the dominant process affecting the surfaces of most extraterrestrial bodies today. On Earth, however, such craters are often lost over time by active geological processes, but elsewhere in the Solar System, there are some truly majestic examples of impact craters ...
Astronomers have been working to better understand the galactic environments of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — intense, momentary bursts of energy occurring in mere milliseconds and with unknown cosmic origins. Now, a study of the slow-moving, star-forming gas in the same galaxy found to host an FRB has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. This ...
Fast radio bursts — intense, milliseconds-long flashes of radio energy from outer space — have puzzled astronomers since they were first spotted in 2007. A single burst can emit as much energy in its brief life as the Sun does in a few days. The great majority of the short-lived pulses originate outside our Milky ...
When stars like our Sun die, they tend to go out with a whimper and not a bang — unless they happen to be part of a binary (two) star system that could give rise to a supernova explosion. Now, for the first time, astronomers have spotted the radio signature of just such an event ...
How did we get here? Where are we going? And how long will it take? These questions are as old as humanity itself, and, if they’ve already been asked by other species elsewhere in the Universe, potentially very much older than that. They are also some of the fundamental questions we are trying to answer ...
Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of dark matter, an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see. We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter,” the universe as we see it would make no sense. But the nature ...
The coastal town of Exmouth in Western Australia experienced one of the most spectacular astronomical phenomena on April 20, 2023 — a total solar eclipse. Eclipses have entranced us for millennia. But it turns out that calculating exactly when and where we can watch an eclipse in its full glory can be surprisingly hard. Watching ...
On Thursday, April 20, the Ningaloo region of Western Australia will experience a total solar eclipse. Eclipse chasers from around the world are converging on the town of Exmouth in hopes of experiencing the profound awe of standing in the Moon’s shadow as it quickly races by. Only a narrow path across Earth, which includes ...
Finding life on other planets might well be the holy grail of astronomy, but the hunt for suitable host exoplanets that can sustain life is a resource-intensive task. The search for exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System) involves competing for time on Earth’s biggest telescopes — yet the hit rate of this search can be ...
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