'Snowball Earth' is the most extreme climate event in Earth's history, when it was completely engulfed in ice. The theory of its existence has faced two challenges - how life survived and variations in rock formations from...
A study published in Nature Astronomy concludes that known geochemical processes can’t explain the levels of methane measured by the Cassini spacecraft on Saturn’s icy moon.
An unknown methane-producing process is likely at work in the...
A study led by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester, UK, (now based at the Open University, UK) used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. The study team...
Palomar 5 is a unique star cluster. In a new paper, astrophysicists show that distinguishing features of Palomar 5 are likely the result of an oversized black hole population of more than 100 of them in the...
A new study disputes the prevailing hypothesis on why Mercury has a big core relative to its mantle. For decades, scientists argued that hit-and-run collisions blew away much of Mercury's rocky mantle and left the big, dense,...
Japanese astronomers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique to remove noise in astronomical data due to random variations in galaxy shapes. After extensive training and testing on large mock data created by supercomputer simulations, they...
Our universe is expanding, but our two main ways to measure how fast this expansion is happening have resulted in different answers. For the past decade, astrophysicists have been gradually dividing into two camps: one that believes...
Astronomers have found a stellar corpse often called a white dwarf that’s roughly the scale of Earth’s moon. White dwarfs are the collapsed remnants of stars that were once about eight times the mass of our Sun...
New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems.Some exoplanet searches could be missing...
Analysing images from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, the researchers calculated the age of these galaxies as ranging from 200 to 300 million years, allowing an estimate of when their stars first formed.
A cluster of comet fragments believed to have hit Earth nearly 13,000 years ago may have shaped the origins of human civilisation, research suggests.
Possibly the most devastating cosmic impact since the extinction of...
