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Exoplanet Host Star Shares Elemental Traits with Its Hot Jupiter
An ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet orbiting a young A-type star gave scientists using the Gemini South telescope a look at how both a star and its hot planet can have similar chemical compositions. The team, led by Arizona State University graduate student Jorge Antonio Sanchez, took spectra of the planet, called WASP-189b, using the Immersion Grating
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Saturn’s Magnetic Shield Is Not Where Anyone Expected It To Be.
Even a modest telescope reveals the breathtaking Saturnian ring system that has captivated astronomers for four centuries, a world so alien in its beauty that first time observers often struggle to believe what they are seeing is real. But Saturn’s rings are just the beginning. Beneath that iconic silhouette lies a planet of extraordinary extremes,
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The Most Quiet Place We’ve Ever Listened From!
We have been searching for signals from other civilisations for over sixty years. Radio telescopes on Earth have swept the sky, listened patiently, and found nothing but silence. It is a search that demands extraordinary sensitivity and that is the problem, Earth and our very existence itself is getting in the way. Every mobile phone,
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Two Monsters, One Galaxy, and a Collision 100 Years Away!
Space is full of objects that push the boundaries of imagination, but few do it quite as effectively as a black hole. At its simplest, a black hole is a region of space where gravity has become so overwhelmingly powerful that nothing, no matter, no light, nothing can escape its grip. They form when massive
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A New Study Narrows the Search for Water on the Moon
When India’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter released the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) into the Shackleton crater on the Moon, they confirmed something scientists had speculated about for decades. The Moon, an airless and vacuum-desiccated body, has abundant sources of water ice around its poles! Located in the many craters that litter the region, these permanently shadowed regions
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Are Neutrinos Their Own Evil Twins? Part 2: The Weak Left-Hander
(This is Part 2 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 first.) What I’m about to say may be some small comfort for those of you who are left-handed and feel like the world isn’t constructed with you in mind. When it comes
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The Chip That Could Survive Venus
Every electronic device you have ever owned shares a critical weakness. Push it past roughly 200 degrees Celsius and it begins to fail. Your phone, your car’s computer, the satellites orbiting above your head right now, all of them have the same thermal ceiling baked into their design. For decades, that ceiling has been one
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The Craters that Made Us
How does something come from nothing? It is perhaps the most profound question in all of science and one we still cannot fully answer. How did a barren, lifeless planet transform itself, over billions of years, into a world teeming with life? Where did it actually begin? For decades, deep sea hydrothermal vents have been
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The Moon Just Got a New Scar
Look up at a full Moon on a clear night and you are staring at a face that has been punched, gouged, and battered for four billion years. Those dark patches are vast basins blasted open by impacts so colossal they reshaped a world. The lighter highlands are pocked and pitted, crater upon crater, each
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Are Neutrinos Their Own Evil Twins? Part 1: So We’re Going to Redefine “Particle”
On March 25, 1938, a 31-year-old physicist named Ettore Majorana bought a ticket for a ferry from Palermo to Naples. That night, before boarding, he sent a letter to Antonio Carrelli, director of the Naples Physics Institute: Dear Carrelli, I made a decision that has become unavoidable. There isn’t a bit of selfishness in it,
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Recent Posts
- What Happens When Light Goes Boom? Part 4: What Brad Bradington Is Good For
- “Immature” Lunar Soil Could Be Suitable for Roadways on the Moon
- What Happens When Light Goes Boom? Part 3: Brad Bradington Sprints
- How a Black Hole and a Shredded Star Could Light Up a Galaxy
- Small Trojan Asteroids Defy Expectations
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