Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Dead planets can 'broadcast' for up to a billion years

Astronomers are planning to hunt for cores of exoplanets around white dwarf stars by 'tuning in' to the radio waves that they emit.

August 6, 2019 Read more

Astronomers discover a new type of pulsating star

A team of scientists recently discovered a new class of pulsators that vary in brightness every five minutes.

August 1, 2019 Read more

Hubble uncovers a 'heavy metal' exoplanet shaped like a football

How can a planet be 'hotter than hot'? The answer is when heavy metals are detected escaping from the planet's atmosphere, instead of condensing into clouds.

August 1, 2019 Read more

Confirmation of toasty TESS planet leads to surprising find of promising world (w/video)

A piping hot planet discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has pointed the way to additional worlds orbiting the same star, one of which is located in the star's habitable zone. If made of rock, this planet may be around twice Earth's size.

July 31, 2019 Read more

At the edge of chaos: New method for exoplanet stability analysis

Starting with observational data and scalar time series, this method uses complex network topology to deduce the underlying dynamics of systems in a fast, efficient way without the need for n-body simulations.

July 30, 2019 Read more

Astronomers map vast void in our cosmic neighborhood

Astronomers have published a new study that reveals more of the vast cosmic structure surrounding our Milky Way galaxy.

July 23, 2019 Read more

The early days of the Milky Way revealed

New study puts a sequence to the events which gave rise to our Galaxy.

July 22, 2019 Read more

Chemistry of the cosmological dark ages studied in the lab

New measurements imply dramatically higher abundance of helium hydride ions in the early universe.

July 18, 2019 Read more

'Moon-forming' circumplanetary disk discovered in distant star system

Astronomers have made the first-ever observations of a circumplanetary disk, the planet-girding belt of dust and gas that astronomers strongly theorize controls the formation of planets and gives rise to an entire system of moons, like those found around Jupiter.

July 12, 2019 Read more

Galaxy clusters caught in a first kiss

For the first time, astronomers have found two giant clusters of galaxies that are just about to collide. This observation can be seen as a missing 'piece of the puzzle' in our understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe.

July 12, 2019 Read more

Hubble uncovers black hole disk that shouldn't exist

As if black holes weren't mysterious enough, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a supermassive black hole at the heart of the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.

July 11, 2019 Read more

Astronomers expand cosmic 'cheat sheet' in hunt for life

Using nature's color palette from early Earth, astronomers have created a cosmic 'cheat sheet' in order to understand where discovered exoplanets may fall along their own evolutionary spectrum.

July 10, 2019 Read more

Exactly how fast is the universe expanding?

The collision of two neutron stars (GW170817) flung out an extraordinary fireball of material and energy that is allowing a team of astrophysicists to calculate a more precise value for the Hubble constant, the speed of the universe's expansion.

July 9, 2019 Read more

Tungsten as interstellar radiation shielding?

Metallophilic microorganisms could benefit from the heavy metal in harsh survival conditions.

July 9, 2019 Read more

Supercomputer shows 'Chameleon Theory' could change how we think about gravity

Supercomputer simulations of galaxies have shown that Einstein's theory of General Relativity might not be the only way to explain how gravity works or how galaxies form.

July 8, 2019 Read more

Massive stars grow same way as light stars, just bigger

Astronomers obtained the first detailed face-on view of a gaseous disk feeding the growth of a massive baby star. They found that it shares many common features with lighter baby stars. This implies that the process of star formation is the same, regardless of the final mass of the resulting star.

July 8, 2019 Read more

New method may resolve difficulty in measuring universe's expansion

Astronomers have demonstrated how a combination of gravitational-wave and radio observations, along with theoretical modeling, can turn the mergers of pairs of neutron stars into a 'cosmic ruler' capable of measuring the expansion of the Universe and resolving an outstanding question over its rate.

July 8, 2019 Read more

Methane vanishing on Mars: Researchers propose new mechanism as an explanation

Scientists have proposed a previously overlooked physical-chemical process that can explain the rapid disappearance of methane from Mars' atmosphere.

July 2, 2019 Read more