Dark matter is increasingly puzzling. Around the world, physicists have been trying for decades to determine the nature of these matter particles, which do not emit light and are therefore invisible to the human eye. Their existence was postulated...
The sun might emit less radiation by mid-century, giving planet Earth a chance to warm a bit more slowly but not halt the trend of human-induced climate change.
The cooldown would be the result of what scientists call a grand...
Building a submarine gets tricky when the temperature drops to -300 Fahrenheit and the ocean is made of methane and ethane.
Washington State University researchers are working with NASA to determine how a submarine might work on Titan, the largest...
Magnetism plays a critical role in various solar phenomena such as flares, mass ejections, flux ropes, and coronal heating. Sunspots are areas of concentrated magnetic fields. A sunspot usually consists of a circular dark core (the umbra) with a...
The planet Mars has long drawn interest from scientists and non-scientists as a possible place to search for evidence of life beyond Earth because the surface contains numerous familiar features such as dried river channels and dried lake beds...
A study led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers provides new insight into the Moon's excessive equatorial bulge, a feature that solidified in place over four billion years ago as the Moon gradually distanced itself from the Earth.
The research...
Planets around the faint red star TRAPPIST-1, just 40 light-years from Earth, were first detected by the TRAPPIST-South telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in 2016. In the following year further observations from ground-based telescopes, including ESO's Very Large...
A series of four studies have shed new light on the properties of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, currently our most optimal hope for evidence of biological life beyond the Solar system.
Since the extent of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system was...
Extremely distant galaxies are usually too faint to be seen, even by the largest telescopes. But nature has a solution: gravitational lensing, predicted by Albert Einstein and observed many times by astronomers. Now, an international team of astronomers, led...
A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team has discovered for the first time a population of planets beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Using microlensing -- an astronomical phenomenon and the only known method capable of discovering planets at truly great...
An international team of astronomers has determined that Centaurus A, a massive elliptical galaxy 13 million light-years from Earth, is accompanied by a number of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting the main body in a narrow disk. In a paper...
