Can rocky exoplanets orbiting stars smaller than our Sun support life as we know it? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as an international team of researchers examined the atmospheric stability of exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars, which typically range from 7.5 percent to 50 percent of our Sun’s…

Some 1,350 light-years from Earth, astronomers detected strange pairs of unexplained objects orbiting in the Orion Nebula. Since then, about 12 months ago, other scientists have proposed a new potential explanation for these apparitions, while other researchers wonder whether they exist at all. “There’s a bit less confidence they exist,” said Rosalba Perna, a theoretical…

Carl Sagan (born November 9, 1934, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died December 20, 1996, Seattle, Washington) was an American astronomer and science writer. A popular and influential figure in the United States, he was controversial in scientific, political, and religious circles for his views on extraterrestrial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and religion. (Read Carl Sagan’s Britannica entry…

The SpaceX Crew Dragon craft Endeavour approaches the ISS in 2021 during the Crew-2 mission. Credit: NASA/Michael Hopkins When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour returns to Earth this week, she will set a clutch of records for the most time spent in space by a crewed spacecraft. Launched for her fifth mission in March, Endeavour…

How does extra salty water, also known as briny water, form and evolve on worlds without atmospheres, such as asteroids and moons? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how briny water could still flow for a period of time on…

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Astronomers say the discovery of drifting quasars from the early universe are challenging our understanding of how these massive, luminous, and extremely distant objects could have formed, according to new findings made possible by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Quasars are extremely bright celestial objects that are believed to possess massive black holes, and some…

photo by: University of Kansas KU astronomy professor Elisabeth Mills’ proposed space probe, PRIMA, has been chosen by NASA for funding and further investigation. <!– SHOW ARTICLE –> A space probe concept with a KU team member has moved on to the next stage of evaluation for a $1 billion mission set to launch into…

Telstar 1Telstar 1, launched July 10, 1962, relayed the first transatlantic television signals.(more) Although some early space experiments explored the use of large orbiting satellites as passive reflectors of signals from point to point on Earth, most work in the late 1950s and early ’60s focused on the technology by which a signal sent from…