Kepler Discovers More Exoplanets / Scientists Classify Types of Planets
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission recently released what it calls the most comprehensive and detailed catalog of candidate exoplanets. Exoplanets or extrasolar planets are planetary bodies that exist outside of our solar system. The new and final Kepler catalog from data gathered from the spacecraft’s initial patch of sky view within the Cygnus constellation includes 219 […]
Is the Universe Connected By a Cosmic Web?
Some people think that the universe is just a hodge-podge of various celestial objects, such as planets, stars and galaxies. But over the years, scientists have found more evidence that the universe may be anything but random, and is actually more organized and interconnected—like an enormous spider web. Our place in the web Let’s start […]
Is Planet 9 Causing Our Solar System to Wobble?
A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggests that Planet 9, the huge and so far unseen planet said to be lurking in the far reaches of the solar system, might be causing our group of planets to wobble a little and giving an impression that the sun is slightly tilted. […]
Did our Sun Snatch Planet 9 from Another Solar System?
Is it possible that the new-found theoretical Planet 9 is actually an exoplanet, a planet from another solar system? According to astronomers at Sweden’s Lund University, it’s “highly likely” that Planet 9 was actually “snatched” from another solar system by our young sun some 4.5 billion years ago, or within 100 million years after its formation. […]
Learning More About Mysterious Planet 9
Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology generated a lot of excitement in the science world back in January when they announced that they had found evidence of a giant planet traveling in an odd, drawn-out orbit in the far reaches of the solar system. So far the new found planet, […]
Astronomers Spot 80 of the Oldest Galaxies
Advancing technology is making it possible for scientists to investigate the early universe. About 200 million years after the Big Bang, it is thought that clumps of condensed primordial cold gas clouds provided material for the first stars to be born. As stars were created they formed small galaxies. An international team of researchers are […]
Study: Lakes On Ancient Mars; Scientists Say They Know Why Elephants Rarely Get Cancer
New Caltech Study Finds That Mars Once Had Lakes A couple of weeks ago the science world was all a twitter after NASA announced that its scientists had found evidence of flowing water on Mars. The excitement raised expectations that life may exist on the Red Planet since, as some say, where there’s water, there’s life. […]
Whirling Black Holes’ Dance to End in Cosmic Blast
Some 3.5 billion light years from Earth, in the Virgo Constellation, there are two black holes (binary black hole), locked by gravity, that are madly orbiting each other. But their orbits are continuing to close in and scientists from Columbia University expect that in about 100,000 years they will join together in one huge cosmic […]
Paralyzed Man Wills Robotic Arm to Move
A quadriplegic man can now operate a robotic arm using just his thoughts and imagination. Erik Sorto, who was paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a gunshot wound 13 years ago, became the first person in the world to have a neuroprosthetic device implanted in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), which is an area […]
Astronomers Capture 3D Images of Mysterious Intergalactic Matter
For the first time, 3D images have been captured of a cosmological entity called the intergalactic medium (IGM). Until now, the structure of IGM had been theoretical. The discovery could provide astronomers with a new understanding of galactic and intergalactic dynamics. The images were captured with an instrument built at the California Institute of Technology […]