Space

Metallicity: Did The Milky Way Galaxy Form From The Inside Out?

Results using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided some evidence backing up theoretical divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way's disc – the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that g ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 20 2014 - 11:33am

Why Mars is NOT a Great Place to Live- Amazing to Explore From Orbit- with RC Rovers, and Nature Inspired Avatars

Would you want to live on a "snowball planet", covered with ice sheets and glaciers all the way to the equator? Mars only looks warm because the photos are digitally adjusted to match brighter lighting on Earth, and because it lost most of its w ...

Blog Post - Robert Walker - Sep 4 2015 - 4:59am

Looking For A New Habitable World? Try Alpha Centauri B

The search for extraterrestrial life goes on, sort of. We do it, as half-heartedly as we do anything in space, because we're more afraid of being alone than finding another civilization. Or vice versa. But we may not be looking in the best spots, eve ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 29 2014 - 8:35pm

4 Billion Years Ago, Mars Had Fresh Water

10 years of Opportunity and Spirit on Mars have given us some interesting insights, like that the oldest minerals show that around four billion years ago Mars had liquid water so fresh it could have supported life. ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 26 2014 - 11:01am

Three Generations Of Stars In The Whirlpool Galaxy

NGC 5194, also known as M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is one of the most spectacular examples of a spiral galaxy, with two spiral arms curling into one another in a billowing swirl, this galaxy hosts over a hundred billion stars and is currently merging with ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 27 2014 - 9:05am

Our Spacecraft Could Look Straight At an Extraterrestrial Microbe- And Not See a Thing!

We have learnt so much about the geology of other planets. Our spacecraft have discovered ancient oceans and rivers on Mars, and have found possible habitats for life. But we haven't discovered this life itself, and we know nothing at all about extra ...

Blog Post - Robert Walker - Dec 24 2016 - 10:49am

Universal Thunderdome: Two Early Galaxies Enter, One Early Galaxy Leaves

Why were there old, enormously massive galaxies no longer forming new stars in the very early universe? The first stars already emerged in the very early universe about 200 million years after the Big Bang. Gas is the raw material used to form stars and g ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 29 2014 - 11:52am

'Rogue' Asteroids Are Now Mainstream

We know now that asteroids are relics that can tell us what the planets in our solar system may have been like before they formed cores and mantles and crusts. But that wasn't always the case. Until the past few decades asteroids were viewed in a mor ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 29 2014 - 5:51pm

Circumbinary Planets: How Tatooine Could Have Formed

The linchpin location of the "Star Wars" franchise was the planet Tatooine, home to both Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It, along with its twin suns, appeared in every movie of the franchise except "The Empire Strikes Back". How wo ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 31 2014 - 9:21pm

Weird World: Kepler-413b

Kepler-413b is located 2,300 light-years (about 700 parsecs) away in the constellation Cygnus. It circles a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars every 66 days but what really makes Kepler-413b unusual is that it precesses wildly on its spin axis- The t ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 4 2014 - 2:29pm