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Dust clouds that orbit Earth like moons may finally have had their existence confirmed after more than a half-century of controversy, new research finds. In deep space, there are five points where the gravitational pull of Earth and the moon balance each other. Two of these so-called Lagrange points, L4 and L5, form an equal-sided triangle with Earth and the moon, and move around Earth as the moon orbits the planet. Any objects at either L4 or L5 can stay in relatively stable positions there about 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) from both Earth and the moon, barring any interference from...

The Universe’s first stars after the Big Bang would have consisted entirely of elements like hydrogen, helium, and small amounts of lithium.Those stars then produced elements heavier than helium in their cores and seeded the Universe with them when they exploded as supernovae.The next generation of stars formed from clouds of material laced with those metals, incorporating them into their makeup.The metal content, or metallicity, of stars in the Universe increased as the cycle of star birth and death continued.2MASS J18082002-5104378 B, also known as Gaia DR2 6702907209758894848 B, is unusual because unlike other stars with very low metal content,...

NASA may have ruled that Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever spotted in our system is a "metallic or rocky object" approximately 400 meters (1,312 feet) in length and 40 meters (131 feet) wide, but a new study from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says it could be something much more exciting – it could be "a lightsail of artificial origin" sent from another civilization. The study, which was posted online earlier this month, suggests that Oumuamua's strange "excess acceleration" could be artificial in nature, as it has been implied that it is not an active comet.

A massive glowing "rogue" planetary-mass object has been discovered, surprising scientists with not only its size, but also the fact it's not orbiting a star. The object, named SIMP J01365663+0933473, has a magnetic field more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s and is nearly 13 times the size of the gas giant. At its size, it's right between the size of a planet and a failed star, so scientists will need to study it further to determine exactly what it is. “This object is right at the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf, or ‘failed star,’ and is...

Experts harnessed machine learning technology from Google to spot Kepler-90i, a hot, rocky planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth. A light year, which measures distance in space, equals 6 trillion miles. The surface of Kepler-90i is 800 degrees Fahrenheit, making it unlikely that life as we know it could exist there, according to NASA. By using AI, computers learned to identify planets by trawling Kepler data for instances where the telescope recorded signals from exoplanets far beyond our solar system.

Astronomers have found a cool, Earth-sized planet that's relatively close to our Solar System. The properties of this newly discovered planet - called Ross 128 b - make it a prime target in the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos. At just 11 light-years away, it's the second closest exoplanet of its kind to Earth. But the closest one, known as Proxima b, looks to be less hospitable for life. Found in 2016, it orbits the star Proxima Centauri, which is known to be a rather active "red dwarf" star. This means that powerful eruptions of charged particles periodically...

Last week, a team of astronomers reported the first potential discovery of an exomoon–a satellite orbiting a planet around another star. Part of what is so striking about the report is the scale of this possible planet-moon system. In this case, the “moon” appears to be about the size of Neptune; the planet it orbits is some 10 times the mass of Jupiter, or about 3,000 times the mass of Earth! The system pushes at the limits of how we normally categorize objects in space and invites questions about where we stand in the scale of things. What is the...

The hunt for potentially habitable planets outside of our solar system is one of the most exciting frontiers of science, and you can become a part of it without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home. This week, MIT and Carnegie Science Institute released a huge dataset containing close to 61,000 measurements of over 1600 stars. These measurements contain data that could potentially identify thousands of new exoplanets, many of which might be Earth-like in their nature. Unfortunately, the MIT and Carnegie Institute team simply doesn’t have the capacity to trawl through all of this information,...

August 24, 2006 was a dark day for Pluto enthusiasts. It was on that day that the International Astronomical Union established three conditions a celestial body must meet in order to be considered a planet. A planet must orbit around the sun, it must be massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, and it must have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit, which means, simply put, that it must have a certain amount of gravitational pull. Pluto does not meet the third condition, so once those rules were put in place, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet,” 75...

A new calculation compares the effort so far to exploring a hot tub’s–worth of Earth’s oceansWith no luck so far in a six-decade search for signals from aliens, you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Where is everyone?” A new calculation shows that if space is an ocean, we’ve barely dipped in a toe. The volume of observable space combed so far for E.T. is comparable to searching the volume of a large hot tub for evidence of fish in Earth’s oceans, astronomer Jason Wright at Penn State and colleagues say in a paper posted online September 19 at arXiv.org. “If you...

Astronomers have found evidence of the first moon to exist beyond our solar system. The gargantuan 'exomoon' is similar in size to the gas giant Neptune and orbits a planet 8,000 light years away called Kepler-1625b. More than 3,000 exoplanets - worlds orbiting stars other than the sun - have been found so far but no 'exomoons' have ever been confirmed.

Many galaxies appear to have stronger gravity - and thus more mass - than can be explained by their visible matter alone. Overly massive galaxies are most often attributed to dark matter, an invisible substance that interacts with matter through gravity. To date, though, no one has directly detected dark matter particles. But a well-established notion in physics could hold another explanation for their size. This says that empty space is really a frothy, turbulent sea full of virtual particles - matter and antimatter that spring in and out of existence so fast that we can't see them. Though they...

2015 TG387, a newfound object in the far outer solar system, way beyond Pluto. The orbit of 2015 TG387 shares peculiarities with those of other extremely far-flung bodies, which appear to have been shaped by the gravity of a very large object in that distant, frigid realm — the hypothesized Planet Nine, also known as Planet X. "These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X," And 2015 TG387 is special among these bread crumbs, because it was found during a relatively uniform survey of the northern and southern skies rather than a targeted hunt for clustered objects...

Astronomers have a problem on their hands: How can you make planets if you don’t have enough of the building blocks? Stars are born from colossal clouds of gas and dust and, in their earliest stages, are surrounded by a thin disk of material. Dust grains within this halo collide, sometimes sticking together. The clumps build up into planetary cores, which are big enough to gravitationally attract additional dust and gas, eventually forming planets. But many details about this process remain unknown, such as just how quickly planets arise from the disk, and how efficient they are in capturing material....

-snip- The researchers found that the real division between planets and other celestial bodies, such as asteroids, occurred in the early 1950s when Gerard Kuiper published a paper that made the distinction based on how they were formed.However, this reason is no longer considered a factor that determines if a celestial body is a planet.“The IAU’s definition was erroneous since the literature review showed that clearing orbit is not a standard that is used for distinguishing asteroids from planets, as the IAU claimed when crafting the 2006 definition of planets,” said Dr. Kirby Runyon, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied...

Teaming up to explore the galaxy with an AI assist. First light for TESS. This is the ifrst science image taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. NASA/MIT/TESS ==================================================================== The researchers at NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) in Mountain View California just spent the summer working on out-of-this-world problems. They came from all over the globe and all different disciplines; computer science engineers, planetary scientists, even a particle physicist. For eight weeks they dug through data and maps, created worlds and atmospheres, sorted them, and tested their computer algorithms against the simulations. Their final products are still rough,...

Scientists have uncovered the truth about a mysterious space rock called Oumuamua which has been hurtling through Earth’s solar system and was spotted last year.A group of acclaimed astronomers, including members from NASA, the European Space Agency and the German Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, released a report this week on the origins of the cigar-shaped asteroid which was first observed in October 2017. The name Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first” and was named by the site who first spotted it. According to the report, “a fast moving object on an unbound orbit was discovered close...

Moore’s Law: Life is Older than Earth Itself — “A Process that Began Billions of Years Before the Formation of Our Solar System” Posted on Sep 24, 2018  As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The regression suggests that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, negating Drakes Equation.Our Solar...

Star Trek’s Spock comes from the planet Vulcan, which of course doesn’t exist. But new research might give us the next best thing—an exoplanet orbiting the real-life star that Vulcan is said to be orbiting in the Star Trek universe. In 1991, Gene Roddenberry wrote a letter to Sky & Telescope about what kind of star the planet Vulcan was likely to orbit. In that letter, he specifically picks out one such star, 40 Eridani. Later, 40 Eridani became the canon Vulcan star system featured in a handful of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise.

As recently as two years ago, SETI began picking up a different kind of signal — one that scientists can’t explain but believe that it isn’t born out of an attempt to communicate: fast radio bursts (FRBs). These FRBs are massively powerful; so powerful, in fact, that the leading natural explanation scientists can come up with is that they’re from “highly magnetized neutron stars, blasted by gas streams near to a supermassive black hole.” The problem with that explanation is that the bursts aren’t all coming from one specific place, but they are all coming from one specific region of...