Moons ejected from orbits around gas giant exoplanets could explain several astronomical mysteries, an international team of astronomers suggests. Researchers led by Mario Sucerquia, from the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, and Jaime Alvarado-Montes from Australia’s Macquarie University, modeled the likely behavior of giant exomoons predicted to form around massive planets — and discovered that they ...
Powering a massive biosphere on Earth, photosynthesis is the light-mediated reaction that converts carbon dioxide and water to carbohydrates and oxygen. About 2.3 billion years ago, this reaction led to the dramatic oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere. Evidence exists for oxygen-releasing photosynthesis evolving much earlier — perhaps as early as 3 billion years ago. However, the ...
Some 10 billion years ago, the Milky Way merged with a large galaxy. The stars from this partner, named Gaia-Enceladus, make up most of the Milky Way’s halo and also shaped its thick disk, giving it its inflated form. A description of this mega-merger, discovered by an international team led by University of Groningen astronomer ...
New research from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft’s up-close Grand Finale orbits shows a surprisingly powerful and dynamic interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its rings and its moon Enceladus. The observations show for the first time that the waves travel on magnetic field lines connecting the planet directly to Enceladus. The field lines are ...
Gravitational waves may hold the key to the universe’s expansion. Since it first exploded into existence 13.8 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding, dragging along with it hundreds of billions of galaxies and stars, much like raisins in a rapidly rising dough. Astronomers have pointed telescopes to certain stars and other cosmic sources ...
A Multiverse — where our Universe is only one of many — might not be as inhospitable to life as previously thought, according to new research. Questions about whether other universes might exist as part of a larger Multiverse, and if they could harbor life, are burning issues in modern cosmology. Now new research led ...
A multitude of discoveries are on the horizon after a much-awaited release that is based on 22 months of charting the sky as part of Gaia’s mission to produce the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy ever created. The new data includes positions, distance indicators, and motions of more than 1 billion stars, along with ...
New images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other telescopes reveal a rich landscape of stars and glowing clouds of gas in one of our closest neighboring galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud, including a dead star circled by light. The pictures have allowed astronomers to identify an elusive dead star buried among filaments ...
A distinct lack of the chemical element phosphorus in other parts of the Universe could make it very difficult for extra-terrestrial life to exist there. This is according to experts at Cardiff University, who have found very little evidence of the element — which is essential to life on Earth — around the Crab Nebula, ...
Astronomers, using data from the Gemini and W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawai’i, have encountered a galaxy that appears to have almost no dark matter. Since the Universe is dominated by dark matter and it is the foundation upon which galaxies are built, “…this is a game changer,” according to Principal Investigator Pieter van Dokkum ...
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