NASA scientists have discovered a new planet orbiting around a nearby star that is in a habitable zone. But does this planet have liquid oceans that can support life?
Dark sky sites can inspire new generations of stargazers, but a better long-term solution would be connecting people with the night sky where they live.
Around the world and throughout history, we find remarkably similar constellations defined by disparate cultures, as well as strikingly similar narratives describing the relationships between them.
If you got too close to a black hole, it would suck you in and you’d never be able to escape, even if you were travelling at the speed of light.
This point of no return is called the event horizon.
Yes, the Sun absolutely spins. In fact, everything in the universe spins. Some things spin faster than the Sun, some are slower and some things spin ‘backwards’.
Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland and Stephen Kane, University of California, Riverside
Science is full of surprises. While searching for planets orbiting nearby stars, researchers stumbled across the remains of a star that once outshone the Sun.
Shooting stars are not stars at all. They are tiny space adventurers who accidentally wander into our sky and get sucked toward us by Earth’s gravity. Here’s the story of a shooting star’s journey.
Brad Carter, University of Southern Queensland and Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland
There are lots of places where it’s much, much hotter than the Sun. And the amazing thing is that this heat also makes new atoms - tiny particles that have made their way long ago from stars to us.
We are in the Milky Way. If you travelled on an extremely fast spaceship for more than two million years, you would reach our neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. All other galaxies are even further away.
People long assumed all the elements we see now were created during the Big Bang. But on May 2, 1952, an astronomer reported spotting new elements coming from an old star and changed our origin story.