Professor Stephen Hawking: 1942 – 2018
Stephen Hawking, the brilliant, respected and world-famous theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author, died at his home in Cambridge, England on March 14, 2018, at age 76. Throughout his 50+ year career, Professor Hawking helped us better understand the origins and workings of our universe. According to a biography published on his website, www.hawking.org.uk, Stephen William Hawking was […]
Nearby Star Produces Powerful Solar Flare Blast
Those looking for the possible habitability of Proxima Centauri b, the closest exoplanet to Earth, may have their hopes dashed by new findings of the exoplanet’s parent star. When Proxima Centauri b, a mere 4.24 light years from Earth, was discovered in 2016, scientists found the planet was located within the habitable zone of its […]
Lots of Water Detected in Exoplanet WASP 39b Atmosphere
Scientists, who studied a “hot Jupiter-like” exoplanet with NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, were able to detect signs of water in its atmosphere. And, they didn’t just find signs of a little water – but a lot of water, three times the amount of water on our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter. The exoplanet they […]
First Stars Formed in Universe 180 Million Years After Big Bang
A group of researchers led by Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University, recently made a remarkable discovery by spotting the impressions of the earliest stars in the universe. Soon after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, the universe expanded, cooled and became very dark. Stars and other cosmological objects hadn’t formed yet. […]
Amateur Astronomer Images First Light From Supernova
An amateur astronomer strikes gold when, for the first time, he was able to image the initial burst of optical light produced by a supernova millions of light years from Earth. Victor Buso of Rosario, Argentina is a locksmith by trade and a self-taught astronomer. On September 20, 2016, Mr. Buso was trying out a new […]
95 New Exoplanets Found With Data From NASA’s K2 Mission
Thanks to data from NASA’s K2 mission, an international team of scientists, led by Andrew Mayo of the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark have recently discovered 95 more exoplanets. From a list of some 275 candidates, the researchers validated 149 of them as actual exoplanets. According to the research team, it […]
Hubble Tracks Mysterious Storms on Neptune
When NASA’s Voyager 2 visited Neptune, in 1989, scientists noticed immense dark storms swirling in its atmosphere. Since then only the Hubble Space Telescope has had the ability to spot and track these mysterious storms. Hubble found a pair of these dark storms in the mid-1990s and then noticed they later had disappeared completely. The […]
Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies Have the Same Mass
In 2012, NASA astronomers predicted that our Milky Way galaxy will collide and merge with its neighboring Andromeda galaxy in about 4 billion years. Scientists said that when this galactic collision takes place, Andromeda, which was thought to be two to three times the size of the Milky Way – will completely engulf our galaxy. Now, […]
High-Tech Meteorite Hunting
Scientists estimate that thousands of extraterrestrial rocks enter our atmosphere every year, most of which burn up or fragment into smaller pieces before hitting Earth. Here’s how the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA/JPL refer to various space objects. Asteroid: A relatively small, inactive, rocky body orbiting the Sun. Comet: A relatively small, […]
New Insight Into TRAPPIST 1 Planets
Two new, but separate, studies provide fresh insight into planets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. One of the studies, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests the atmospheres of at least three of the seven TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets found so far do not seem to be as hydrogen-rich as our solar system’s gas giant […]