From the American Geophysical Union and the “Pluto is still denied planetary status” department comes this idea: WASHINGTON, DC — Scientists suggest in a new study the existence of a planetary object called a “synestia,” a huge, spinning, donut-shaped mass of hot, vaporized rock, formed as planet-sized objects smash into each other. At one point…
WASHINGTON, DC — One million miles from Earth, a NASA camera is capturing unexpected flashes of light reflecting off our planet. The homeward-facing instrument on NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, launched in 2015, caught hundreds of these flashes over the span of a year. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument aboard DSCOVR…
Guest post by David Middleton They must have used the RCP 8.5 Death Star… The announcement of the Trappist-1 system in February, with seven rocky planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star, sent ripples of excitement through astrobiologists everywhere. At least three of the planets looked like they were within the star’s “habitable zone” – the…
From the “Make Pluto Great Again” department, new definition raises number of planets in solar system to about 110 Johns Hopkins University scientist Kirby Runyon wants to make one thing clear: Regardless of what one prestigious scientific organization says to the contrary, Pluto is a planet. So, he says, is Europa, commonly known as a…
From the University of Wisconsin From rocks in Colorado, evidence of a ‘chaotic solar system’ Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in…
Dwarf star 200 million light years away contains life’s building blocks UCLA-led team discovers object in the constellation Boötes with carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – LOS ANGELES Many scientists believe the Earth was dry when it first formed, and that the building blocks for life on our planet — carbon, nitrogen…
Tail of stray black hole hiding in the Milky Way From the NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF NATURAL SCIENCES It is difficult to find black holes, because they are completely black. In some cases black holes cause effects which can be seen. For example if a black hole has a companion star, gas streaming into the black…
