Space

There Could Be 6 Billion Planets Like Ours In Just This Galaxy

How big is the universe? No one really knows, but since we are in just one Orion spur of the arm of Sagittarius in one galaxy, and there are an unknown number of galaxies, it's big. So big our galaxy alone could have 6,000,000,000 planets like ours, a ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 16 2020 - 12:52pm

Is There Life Inside Pluto? Its Hot Birth May Have Created An Internal Ocean

Pluto, along with many other dwarf planets in the outer solar system, is often thought of as dark, icy and barren – with a surface temperature of just −230°C. But now a new study, published in Nature Geoscience, suggests that the body has had a warm inter ...

Article - The Conversation - Jun 22 2020 - 12:36pm

Other Planets With Oceans Are Common

Though we've only detected a few thousand exoplanets, there are likely 6,000,000,000 Earth-like ones out there, and that means millions could be "ocean worlds" capable of supporting life. Right now, our knowledge of ocean worlds is limited t ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 22 2020 - 2:03pm

Sunsets On Other Worlds

How a sunset would appear on other planets is a staple of science-fiction. The sun is as fundamental to grounding our existence as the earth, for most of us. Yet lots of people go months without seeing a sunrise or sunset. That's extreme, but even mor ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 23 2020 - 8:45am

Goldilocks Planet: Being Just Right Is Why Earth Provided The Ingredients For Life

When it comes to evolutionary biology and life on other planets, there is talk of amino acids, the building blocks of our existence. But for any of that to work we first needed magnetic fields and plate tectonics, and a new paper finds that Earth became a ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 24 2020 - 5:31am

How Dying White Dwarfs Breathe Life Into Earth

The origin of carbon in the Milky Way is a mystery but one source of many elements is not: Dying white dwarfs. As those dying stars pass into oblivion, they sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos. These ashes, spread via stellar winds, are enriched with many ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 7 2020 - 11:20am

Mars Has Underground Lava Caves So Large We Can Build A Settlement In Them

A lava tube is just what it sounds like; a cave created when the surface of lava hardens but continues to flow underneath. When that trickles to a halt, the cave is left behind. These remaining caves exist on Earth and high-resolution pictures taken by int ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 6 2020 - 9:22am

Collision Course: The Andromeda Galaxy Halo Is Already Running Into Our Own

The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, has been found to have a nearly invisible halo of diffuse plasma that extends about halfway to our Milky Way. That's 1.3 million light-years, and it may go 2 million light-years in some parts, ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 31 2020 - 10:59am

Discovered: WD 1586 B, A Planet That Survived The Death Of Its Star

(Inside Science)-- For the first time, an intact world may have been discovered around a white dwarf, suggesting that even after typical stars die, they may still host planets, a new study finds. White dwarfs are the cooling Earth-size cores of dead stars ...

Article - Inside Science - Sep 18 2020 - 10:37am

No Realistic Possibility Of False Vacuum Collapse (Higgs Vacuum Decay) For Billions Of Years- Not A Concern

The false vacuum collapse is about a remote possibility, not just billions of years in the future, so far in the future that all the stars in the night sky have run out of fuel, long before. There is no realistic possibility at present, or for billions of ...

Article - Robert Walker - Sep 24 2020 - 9:21am