Anyone familiar with the search for alien life will have heard of the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star. This is defined as the orbital band where the temperature is just right for liquid water to pool on a rocky planet’s surface—a good approximation for what we thought of as the early conditions for life on […]

On April 8, 2024, people across the world witnessed a solar eclipse, a relatively rare event in which the moon occults (blocks out) light from the sun. To capture this event, volunteers at 143 observatories across the U.S. trained their equipment on it as part of NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project. The images they […]

Researchers from the University of Bologna and the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) along with other institutes have proposed a new way to address the Hubble tension by comparing estimates of the universe’s age rather than its expansion rate. Using precise stellar data, they determined ages for carefully selected very old Milky Way stars […]

When most people think of a supernova, they’re thinking of a Type II core-collapse supernova. These are massive stars that have reached the end of their time on the main sequence. They’ve used up their supply of hydrogen and continue fusing heavier elements until the star can’t support its own mass. The core collapses and […]

What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere.

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