33+ min ago  (452+ words) You're an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet,…...

4+ hour, 16+ min ago  (304+ words) Jupiter, the gravitational behemoth that makes up a lion's share of our solar system's planetary content, is much more complicated than ever previously thought. Or so say leaders from NASA's highly successful Juno mission....

8+ hour, 23+ min ago  (218+ words) The cosmological constant has been a problem in physics since Einstein, but new research may show why it takes the value that it does despite quantum fluctuations that should make its value practically infinite....

12+ hour, 9+ min ago  (107+ words) If you've ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you've probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a "cheat sheet" for stellar astrophysics…...

1+ day, 3+ hour ago  (432+ words) Decades of research shows that Earth was once entirely or almost entirely frozen. The episode is known as Snowball Earth, and though its occurrence is widely accepted, many of its details remain hypothetical. Snowball Earth took place in Earth's Cryogenian…...

1+ day, 4+ hour ago  (508+ words) Universe Today Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, is also the Solar System's largest satellite, even larger than the planet Mercury. It is also the only celestial body aside from Earth (and the gas giants) to have an intrinsic magnetic field. As…...

1+ day, 7+ hour ago  (891+ words) Universe Today Welcome back to our ongoing series, A Brief-ish History of SETI, where we examine the ideas and milestones that have come to define the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In Part I, we looked at the purpose and…...

1+ day, 13+ hour ago  (253+ words) That magic number, specifically, is 0. 8 Earth radii, according to the Smaller Than Earth Habitability Model (STEHM) that the researchers developed. And that limit seems to be determined by two specific hurdles that planets must jump in order to be viable…...

2+ day, 5+ hour ago  (20+ words) Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange...

2+ day, 7+ hour ago  (433+ words) A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars,…...