By studying the chemical elements on Mars today—including carbon and oxygen—scientists can work backwards to piece together the history of a planet that once had the conditions necessary to support life.
Weaving this story, element by element, from roughly 140...
New evidence shows the first-ever pictures capturing the birth of a pair of planets orbiting the star PDS 70 are in fact authentic.
Using a new infrared pyramid wavefront sensor for adaptive optics (AO) correction at W. M. Keck Observatory...
Earlier this year, an international team of scientists announced the second detection of a gravitational-wave signal from the collision of two neutron stars. The event, called GW190425, is puzzling: The combined mass of the two neutron stars is greater than...
The mystery of some lava-like flows on Mars has been solved by scientists who say they are caused not by lava but by mud.
There are tens of thousands of these landforms on the Martian surface, often situated where there...
We live in a big-city galaxy. The Milky Way is so big it has satellite galaxies that orbit it, just as the Moon orbits the Earth. These arrangements tell us a great deal about the secrets of the universe—from...
Like crystal balls for the universe's deeper mysteries, galaxies and other massive space objects can serve as lenses to more distant objects and phenomena along the same path, bending light in revelatory ways.
Gravitational lensing was first theorized by Albert...
By listening to the beating hearts of stars, astronomers have for the first time identified a rhythm of life for a class of stellar objects that had until now puzzled scientists.
Their findings are reported today in Nature.
"Previously we were finding...
Astronomers at the University of Canterbury (UC) have found an incredibly rare new Super-Earth planet towards the centre of the galaxy. The planet is one of only a handful that have been discovered with both size and orbit comparable...
New research published today in the journal Nature Astronomy reveals a type of destructive event most often associated with disaster movies and dinosaur extinction may have also contributed to the formation of the Moon's surface.
A group of international scientists led by...
In a study recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. Jade Powell and Dr. Bernhard Mueller from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) simulated three core-collapse supernovae using supercomputers from across...
As new and more powerful telescopes blink on in the next few years, astronomers will be able to aim the megascopes at nearby exoplanets, peering into their atmospheres to decipher their composition and to seek signs of extraterrestrial life....
