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astronomy

SPACE: Bizarre Planet Might Have Vaporized Rock for “Air”

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Red Planet - pixabay

Scientists think they have identified a lava world so dramatic that it might boast a thin regional atmosphere of vaporized rock where it is closest to its star. That exoplanet is called K2-141b and was originally discovered in 2017. The world is about half again as big as Earth but orbits so close to its star, which is one class smaller than our own, that it completes several loops each Earth-day with the same surface permanently facing the star. Now, scientists predict those factors mean that two-thirds of the surface of K2-141b is permanently sunlit — so much so that … Read more

We May Already Have Discovered Planets More Hospitable to Life Than Earth

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Habitable Planet? - NASA

At least two dozen planets outside the solar system might be better for life than Earth. These planets are just a little older, a little wetter, a little warmer and a little larger than Earth is, researchers wrote Sept. 18 in the journal Astrobiology. All of these factors could mean that some of these planets are the best places to search for extraterrestrial life. “We have to focus on certain planets that have the most promising conditions for complex life. However, we have to be careful to not get stuck looking for a second Earth because there could be planets … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers Watch Black Hole Turn Star Into Spaghetti

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spaghetti - pixabay

A black hole in a galaxy not far from Earth gobbled up a star like it was a big, exploding noodle, and astronomers got a front-row seat to the action. The “unfortunate star,” as the researchers called it in their paper, was orbiting in the dense nucleus of a galaxy with the unwieldy name 2MASX J04463790-1013349 about 214 million years ago when it found itself on a doomed path. It had wandered too close to the galaxy’s central, supermassive black hole. And that black hole stretched it out like spaghetti and swallowed it one big gulp. (Scientists literally call this … Read more

ANNOUNCEMENT/GIVEAWAY: Perceptions – Mary Eicher

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Perceptions - Mary Eicher

Mary Eicher has a new FF paranormal book out, Artemis Book 2: ‘Perceptions.” And there’s a giveaway! A fourteen year-old boy is struck by a car and left to die in a derelict section of town. He is the latest victim in a rash of deadly accidents spoiling a hot California summer. Artemis Andronikos, a beautiful attorney with a teenage of her own, knows the deaths are not the unrelated mishaps the authorities assume. The victims are Harbinger children gifted with extraordinary perceptive abilities. It has been seven years since the Harbinger suddenly appeared enabling people to foresee traumatic events. … Read more

SPACE: Are There Huge Black Holes Out There?

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black hole - pixabay

Black holes can get big … really big. But just how big? It’s possible they could top out at over a trillion times more massive than the sun. That’s 10 times bigger than the largest known black hole so far. But could these monsters truly exist in our universe? A team of researchers has come up with a plan to go hunting for them. And if they exist, they could help us solve the mysteries of how the first stars appeared in the cosmos. If you want to go shopping for black holes in the universe, unfortunately you only have … Read more

SPACE: Behold The Rarest of Planets

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Thee Sun Planet

Perched on the tip of Orion’s nose, there spins a solar system that could give Tatooine — Luke Skywalker’s twin-sunned homeworld — a run for its money. Known as GW Orionis (or GW Ori) and located about 1,300 light-years from Earth, the system is a rare example of a triple-star solar system, with two suns orbiting one another at the center, and a third star swirling around its siblings from several hundred million miles away. Scientists previously identified the system by its three bright rings of planet-forming dust, nested inside one another like a massive orange bullseye in the sky. … Read more

Was Oumuamua a “Cosmic Dust Bunny”?

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Oumuamua

Ever since it floated through our cosmic neck of the woods, the interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua has intrigued and perplexed scientists. Now, a new theory has emerged that the cigar-shaped space rock might actually be a dust bunny. Here on Earth, “dust bunnies” are clumps of accumulated dust and debris held together by static electricity that float around under furniture, pushed by passing breezes. But, the scientists behind a new study suggest that ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever spotted in our solar system, could be (basically) a scaled-up dust bunny. The study, led by Jane Luu, an astronomer at the … Read more

SPACE: Does the Sun Have a Long-Lost Twin?

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binary stars - European Space Agency

The most distant region of our solar system, a sphere of dark, icy debris out beyond Neptune, is too crowded. All that stuff out there, beyond the reach of the ancient disk of gas and dust that formed the planets, doesn’t match with scientific models of how the solar system formed. Now, a pair of researchers has offered a new take on this far-out mystery: Our sun has a long-lost twin. And the two stars spent their childhoods collecting the passing debris from interstellar space, crowding the outer reaches of the solar system. We can’t see this twin. Wherever it … Read more

ASTRONOMY: Did a Supernova Trigger a Mass Extinction on Earth?

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supernova - pixabay

A global extinction event around 359 million years ago may have been triggered by the death blast of a distant star, a new study suggests. Toward the end of the Devonian period (416 million to 358 million years ago), there was a mass extinction known as the Hangenberg Event; it wiped out armored fish called placoderms and killed off approximately 70% of Earth’s invertebrate species. But scientists have long puzzled over what caused the die-off. Recently, preserved plant spores offered clues about this ancient extinction. Fossil spores spanning thousands of years at the boundary of the Devonian and the Carboniferous … Read more

SPACE: The Moon’s Younger Than We Thought

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Moon formation

It turns out the moon is a little younger than scientists previously thought — about 85 million years younger, to be precise. In a new study, researchers at the German Aerospace Center found out that, not only did the moon once have a massive, fiery magma ocean, but our rocky satellite also formed later than scientists previously expected. Billions of years ago, a Mars-size protoplanet smashed into the young Earth and, amid the debris and cosmic rubble, a new rocky body formed — our moon. In this new work, the researchers reconstructed the timeline of the moon’s formation. While scientists … Read more