Exoplanets are distant, mysterious cousins of our own home — obscure balls of rock and gas orbiting stars hundreds of light years away. It’s difficult to understand what might be on the surface: are they covered in global oceans? Made up of molten lava? Does it rain razor-sharp shards of glass at thousands of miles per hour? […]
Ice Planet or Lava World? Exoplanet environments depend on temperature Read More »
Source: NASA Of the estimated 200 billion planets in our universe, Earth is the only one known to sustain life. This is an incredibly small statistic, indicating that our planet has a specific amalgamation of characteristics that make it ideal for life to form and survive. With that being said, we might begin to think
The (Not So Easy) Recipe for Life Read More »
In the beginning, all that would become the universe was concentrated into an extremely small, dense, high-energy speck of space. In the fractions of seconds that followed, this singularity exploded: one hundred decillionths (10–35) of a second after, it expanded to nearly the size of a soccer ball; after one nonillionth (10–30) of a second,
Water from Asteroids, Water the Chances? Brian Sousa, Applied Physics, 2020 Source: Pixabay.com Though water makes up over 70 percent of our planet, we still do not know where it originally came from. Research has shown that the early universe was full of water, but the process of how it came to our planet is one
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Developing the theory of dark matter By Emily Dyer, Physics, 2022 Source: Shutterstock.com Human beings have a very limited view of space. The measurements we can take are often clouded by background radiation and interference from the infinite universe. This often causes astronomers to propose the existence of things we cannot see to explain what we
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Cosmic Cuisine By Anushka Biswas, Cell and Molecular Biology, 2023 Source: Flickr Day 152. Shifting through rations, you’re faced with the nightly dilemma: freeze-dried tofu with mustard or nutritional wildberry slurry? Every fibre of your mind and body longs for a carrot. Welcome to life in space. For astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS)
How do you conduct a laboratory experiment when your subject can be as wide as 400 AU and as massive as ten billion suns? An international team of scientists at the Black Hole Laboratory at the University of Nottingham faced this question in their study of black holes. Their solution was to simulate a rotating
Black Holes in a Bathtub? How Scientists are Using Water Vortices to Study Black Holes Read More »
For decades, Mars has been the planet in vogue: the possibility of exploration, even colonization, beyond the Earth system captured the imagination of the public (as well as certain billionaires). But such a mission might be more technically challenging than we’re ready for. Transit of up to a year each way makes it difficult to
Wreaking HAVOC on Venus Read More »
Many kinds of stars, called variable stars, change in brightness, increasing and decreasing in luminosity over periods as long as years or as short as fractions of a second. However, these changes are dependable patterns that repeat over the star’s lifetime, and these fluctuations can only account for up to two percent of the star’s
Sorry, Not Aliens: Tabby’s Star Mystery Solved Read More »