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Astronomers have finally found a planet around the closest single star to the Sun — and there are probably more worlds in this system. The find settles years of controversy.Some stars seem like perfect targets for exoplanet hunters. Barnard's star is certainly one of them: At only six light-years from the Sun in the direction of Ophiuchus, it is the nearest single star and the second-nearest star system after Alpha Centauri. It's so close that you can detect its movement across the sky in photographs taken just a few years apart.Claims of planetary companions to Barnard's star have been made...

They’re running rings around Uranus. New research suggests a moon orbiting the sophomoric-sounding planet might contain enough natural resources to support alien life. Scientists from Johns Hopkins and the University of North Dakota say the lunar object, named Miranda, has sources of water hidden below its surface. The finding could be a breakthrough in mankind’s ongoing search for the little green men. “To find evidence of an ocean inside a small object like Miranda is incredibly surprising,” said planetary scientist and researcher Tom Nordheim. The findings were published in The Planetary Science Journal. “It helps build on the story that...

Graphical depiction of Betelgeuse and the Betelbuddy. Credit: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation. ===================================================================== New research has revealed that the star Betelgeuse is likely sharing its orbit with a companion astronomers have nicknamed “Betelbuddy.” According to the new findings, unexpected dips in the star’s brightness observed in 2019 caused some scientists to speculate Betelgeuse may soon enter its supernova phase. As a result, media outlets quickly dubbed the tenth brightest star in the sky the doomed star. Now, an international team of scientists says they’ve ruled out all conventional explanations for the star’s change in brightness, a phenomenon witnessed by observers dating...

NASA is set to launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft to explore Europa, an ocean moon orbiting Jupiter. Europa Clipper’s launch is targeted for no earlier than Monday, Oct. 14, 2024 at 12:06 p.m. EDT (1606 UTC). The spacecraft, the largest NASA has ever built for a planetary mission, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Europa is one of the most promising places in our solar system to find an environment suitable for life beyond Earth. Evidence suggests that the ocean beneath Europa’s icy surface could contain the...

It’s not every day that humans launch a space mission of such potential as it was done on Monday in Cape Canaveral, Florida. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket was launched on a quest to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa and reveal whether its vast hidden ocean might hold the keys to life. The mission will take the spacecraft Europa Clipper five and a half years to reach Jupiter, orbit around the Solar system’s largest planet and sneak close to its fourth largest moon, Europa. Associated Press reported: “Scientists are almost certain a deep, global ocean exists beneath Europa’s icy crust. And...

Hubble And New Horizons are 9 billion kilometers (5.6 million miles) apart but they can still work together. Uranus as seen by Hubble (left) and New Horizons (right). Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team Image Processing Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI) ===================================================================================== Studying exoplanets is not easy. Despite enormous steps forward in technology, models, and observational tricks, astronomers are still looking at small dots either blocking some starlight or reflecting it while being next to a bright object that easily outshines them. It requires practice, and researchers have...

The earliest life on Earth might have been just as purple as it is green today, a scientist claims. Ancient microbes might have used a molecule other than chlorophyll to harness the Sun’s rays, one that gave the organisms a violet hue. Chlorophyll, the main photosynthetic pigment of plants, absorbs mainly blue and red wavelengths from the Sun and reflects green ones, and it is this reflected light that gives plants their leafy color. This fact puzzles some biologists because the sun transmits most of its energy in the green part of the visible spectrum. “Why would chlorophyll have this...

Row erupts over 'life-starter' vents By Paul Rincon BBC science The earliest seafloor hydrothermal vents - supposedly more than three billion years old - may be nothing more than deposits from underground springs active in the last few thousand years. The 'ancient' rocks are exposed on land in South Africa That is the claim of two US geologists who carried out a new analysis of rocks from South Africa which were previously dated to the Archaean period - when life first began to diversify. The findings could have important implications for our understanding of the early Earth and the...

Abiogenesis: The First Frontier There are a number of models and theories out there about how life might have arisen and originated. The goal of this article is educate the reader as to the facts and the myths associated with abiogenesis. The best place to start off on abiogenesis would be the definition. Abiogenesis is the unguided arisal of life from non-living matter. Abiogenesis is basically an attempt to explain the origin of life while nullifying the possibility of a creator. Conditions of the old Earth: There are a number of theories on what the conditions of the prebiotic (pre-life)...

The ancient organisms could help us understand the origins of life on Earth, and may also aid the search for life on other planets. Microbial cells were detected in fractures in the 2-billion-year-old rock sample, stained green, and analyzed. Image credit: Y. Suzuki, S. J. Webb, M. Kouduka et al. 2024/ Microbial Ecology A2-billion-year-old rock has been unearthed in South Africa – and if its advanced age wasn’t enough to knock your socks off, it’s also home to pockets of microbes that are still alive and thriving. Having been around for eons, these are the oldest examples of living microbes...

New research has revealed high-altitude air in Earth’s atmosphere is teeming with living organisms, a discovery that challenges our views on the dispersal of microbes and their relationship to human health. The findings, made by an international collective of climate, health, and atmospheric specialists based in Japan and Spain, has revealed Earth’s atmosphere is populated with a surprisingly diverse array of living bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Discovered at altitudes as high as 1,000 to 3,000 meters, the organisms included several potential human pathogens, revealing their ability to travel over great distances and prompting new concerns about their impact on health...

Artist’s impression of the white dwearf star WD1054–226 orbited by clouds of planetary debris and a major planet in the habitable zone. Credit: Mark A. Garlick / markgarlick.com. ============================================================================== The lifespan of the Sun is 12.3 billion years. This is 1.5 billion years shorter than the age of the Universe, 13.8 billion years. If the Sun happened to be born in the first 1.5 billion years of cosmic history, or equivalently at a cosmological redshift above 4 when the first several percent of all stars formed, then it would have turned into a white dwarf by now. There are about...

A research team led by Lund University in Sweden has discovered a small planet that displays peculiar orbital motion. The shimmying planet, located 455 light-years from Earth, shows that planetary systems can be considerably more complex than researchers have previously thought.The newly discovered planet TOI-1408c has a mass equivalent to eight Earths and circles very close to a larger planet, the hot gas giant TOI-1408b. After starting to study both planets and their star, TOI-1408, in detail, the researchers felt puzzled. The small planet has a very peculiar orbital motion. The interactions between the two planets and their star can...

The image is a composite. 2M1207b orbits the brown dwarf from almost twice as far as Neptune does from the sun, but in the image, the planet appears positioned close to its star. The data used to capture it comes from three near-infrared exposures in different wavebands. It's a technique used to produce images for public consumption, but more importantly, to locate exoplanets around stars. That's because infrared data lessens the huge brightness difference between a star and a planet, making the latter easier to find.It was produced using the 27-foot (8.2 meters) Yepun telescope — part of the Very...

Scientists found that Sedna... had a weird orbit around the sun... hinted that another large mass in the outer solar system was gravitationally pulling on the miniworld...Then, in a 2014 study, astronomers announced that they had detected... 2012 VP113, with an eccentric orbit similar to Sedna's... Since 2016, Brown, Batygin and others... have discovered even more eccentric TNOs — bringing the total to 13...Planet Nine's composition is probably "most like Neptune," ... around 500 astronomical units away from the sun...This far out, it could take between 5,000 and 10,000 years for Planet Nine to complete a single trip around the...

Scientists have revealed that graphite in the ancient Saglek-Hebron iron formations of Nunatsiavut, once thought to indicate the earliest life on Earth, likely has abiotic origins.Early Life on EarthThe isotopic composition of carbon in iron formations from the Saglek-Hebron Complex in Nunatsiavut (northern Labrador) has been seen as evidence of the earliest traces of life on Earth. But a new study by the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, and University College London suggests otherwise.The study shows that the petrographic, geochemical, and spectroscopic features in the graphite (the crystalline form of carbon) found in the Saglek-Hebron chemical sedimentary rocks are in...

...two teams, called UNITE (UNISTELLAR Network Investigating TESS Exoplanets) and Exoplanet Watch, have combined forces to confirm a new planetary discovery—a toasty "warm Jupiter."...Planets around other stars, called exoplanets, sometimes block the light from the stars they orbit. When this happens, it's called a "transit." Amateur astronomers can observe exoplanet transits with their own telescopes by watching for the light from a nearby star to dim.NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) sees these dimming events, too—many thousands of them. But just seeing a star dim once is not enough. You need to catch multiple dimming events (and perform various other...

Earth's North Pole points to a direction in space marked by the North Star. Polaris is both a navigation aid and a remarkable star in its own right. It is the brightest member of a triple-star system and is a pulsating variable star. Polaris gets brighter and fainter periodically as the star’s diameter grows and shrinks over a four-day cycle.Polaris is a kind of star known as a Cepheid variable. Astronomers use these stars as "standard candles" because their true brightness depends on their period of pulsation: Brighter stars pulsate slower than fainter stars. How bright a star appears in...

MacGregor and her colleagues observed Proxima Centauri for 40 hours using nine telescopes on the ground and in space. In the process, they got a surprise: Proxima Centauri ejected a flare, or a burst of radiation that begins near the surface of a star, that ranks as one of the most violent seen anywhere in the galaxy..."The star went from normal to 14,000 times brighter when seen in ultraviolet wavelengths over the span of a few seconds," said MacGregor.

The planet is as cold as ice and orbits far from its star. The observations from JWST of this cold giant planet. Image Credit: T. Müller (MPIA/HdA), E. Matthews (MPIA) ========================================================================== JWST has imaged a new planet directly and it is quite a fascinating object. It orbits one of the three stars in the Epsilon Indi system and it weighs six times the mass of Jupiter. This super-Jupiter is 20 to 40 times further from its star than Earth is from the Sun – so it is very cold. It also doesn't help that the star, Eps Ind A, is...