Most of the stars in the Milky Way are what we might call normal stars. They’re main sequence stars like our sun, meaning they’re doing what most people probably think stars do: shining as they fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms on a vast scale.

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UCLA-led astronomers have discovered the first known “disappearing planet” about 1,000 light-years away. The planet, TOI-2535 b, is a “hot Jupiter,” a gas giant that orbits extremely close to its host star. TOI-2535 b whips around its star in only 8.25 days—10 times faster than the 88 days that Mercury takes to go around our […]

Long-period, high-inclination comets of the sort that can cause extinction-level impacts here on Earth have long been thought to originate from a theoretical Oort cloud. That is, a roughly spherical cloud of icy cometary objects that number in the trillions at distances that extend up to 1.6 light-years away.

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Aliens have long been a staple of science fiction. Yet the possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth is more than a matter of imagination—it is also a subject of serious scientific inquiry. Professor Woong-bae Zee of Sejong University’s School of Liberal Studies has recently published an astronomy paper that places the word “alien” front and […]

An aurora is one of nature’s most spectacular light shows: It looks like green or red curtains rippling across the night sky. When viewed from the ground, this colorful display might seem far away and disconnected from anything happening on Earth’s surface.

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Primordial black holes are hypothetical objects that could have formed directly from dense clumps of matter in the very early universe. If they exist, their dramatic origins would set them apart from the black holes we see today, which form when massive stars collapse. Some theories suggest that “stupendously large” primordial black holes could account […]

We typically think of the moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics—the moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years […]