1+ hour, 52+ min ago  (675+ words) Universe Today During the Cretaceous-Paleogene period (ca. 66 million years ago), a massive impact triggered an extinction-level event (ELE), wiping out about three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. Scientists have named the impactor that caused…...

2+ hour, 53+ min ago  (423+ words) Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard’s Star. Unfortunately, the picture is not encouraging, as all four planets appear to be "extremely uninhabitable."...

4+ hour, 8+ min ago  (116+ words) Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white…...

7+ hour, 49+ min ago  (166+ words) The observed orbit of the star S301. Credit: Dayem, et al. This motion is so extreme that secondary relativistic effects come into play. For example, gravitational redshift and the transverse Doppler effect. We've observed these effects in the lab, but S301 gives…...

7+ hour, 27+ min ago  (426+ words) Dreams of finding a sort of Earth 2.0 motivates a lot of the thinking around the search for exoplanets. But there's more to exoplanet science than searching for potentially habitable worlds. Scientists need a deeper understanding of the exoplanet population overall…...

6+ day, 9+ hour ago  (108+ words) The story of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who as a teenager on an ocean voyage worked out that white dwarf stars have a maximum mass of 1.4 Suns. A tour of degeneracy pressure, the relativistic insight everyone else missed, and the number that…...

20+ hour, 28+ min ago  (184+ words) There is something quietly reassuring about a scientific mystery that gets solved not by a dramatic new discovery, but by simply looking again, more carefully, at something we thought we already understood. That’s exactly what has happened with the Sun,…...

20+ hour, 45+ min ago  (209+ words) A diagram depicting habitable zone boundaries across star type. Earth is plotted alongside 45 exoplanets with radii less than 2 times that of Earth or masses less than 5 times that of Earth, making them potentially rocky worlds in the habitable zone (Credit:…...

1+ day, 23+ hour ago  (489+ words) Before Artemis astronauts land on the Moon’s surface in 2028, NASA will conduct the Artemis III demonstration mission in 2027, allowing teams on Earth and in orbit to practice rendezvous and docking operations between commercial human landing systems and the Orion spacecraft....

2+ day, 5+ hour ago  (366+ words) Finding microfossils of Earth’s oldest complex life is a bit like chasing an astrobiological rainbow. The eukaryotic pot of gold at rainbow’s end always seems just a bit out of reach....