Water is critical to life because cells need liquid to function. That's why scientists focus on finding and studying exoplanets in habitable zones. But even if they're in habitable zones, exoplanets need lots of water to support their carbon cycles. So without water, exoplanets become inhospitable greenhouse planets, regardless if they're in habitable zones or not.
New missions mean new capabilities - and one particularly interesting new mission is finally up and running. Data is starting to come in from SPHEREx, the medium-class surveyor that is mapping the entire sky every six months. A paper based on some of that early data was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, mapping ice and compounds called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) throughout some interesting regions of our Milky Way.
Rubin’s largest asteroid haul yet, gathered before the Legacy Survey of Space and Time even begins, is just the “tip of the iceberg”
Cherenkov radiation isn't just a beautiful phenomenon. It turns up in nuclear reactors, in the upper atmosphere, in gamma ray telescopes on three continents, in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and in hospital imaging suites. Here's what a light boom is actually good for.
Using lunar regolith simulant, a team of researchers demonstrated that "immature" regolith similar to what is expected around the Moon's southern polar region is suitable for rovers to drive on.
We have the crowd. We have the star. Now it's time to put them together. Here's exactly what happens — and why — when a charged particle outruns the local speed of light in a material. Also: why it's always blue.
Understanding the beginning of the solar system requires us to look at some very strange places. One such place is at the so-called “Trojan” asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit in front of and behind it. But for a long time, these cosmic time capsules have held a mystery for astronomers: why are they color-coded? The populations of larger asteroids are very clear split into two distinct groups - the “reds” and the “less reds”, because apparently they’re all red to some extent. A new paper from researchers in Japan tried to solve this mystery by taking a close look at even smaller asteroids, and their findings, published in a recent edition of The Astronomical Journal, actually brings up a completely different question - why don’t smaller Trojan asteroids have the same color-coding?
