Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”.
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Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard’s Star. Unfortunately, the picture is not encouraging, as all four planets appear to be "extremely uninhabitable."
Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white dwarfs. The binaries used to share common envelopes.
A Sun-like star orbits the supermassive black hole in our Milky Way so closely that it comes within the distance of Neptune's orbit of the Sun. It has a top speed of more than 8% of light speed. With such extreme motion the star gives astronomers the opportunity to test the limits of general relativity.
The story of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who as a teenager on an ocean voyage worked out that white dwarf stars have a maximum mass of 1.4 Suns. A tour of degeneracy pressure, the relativistic insight everyone else missed, and the number that would define his life.
Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky planet in another star's habitable zone for the very first time. It’s a milestone that brings us a step closer to answering whether life could exist beyond our Solar System. Predicted by a mathematical model before it was ever observed, and confirmed using a rare planetary alignment 48 light years away, this discovery does more than identify one intriguing world, it provides us with a whole new way to search for others like it.
Old rocks exposed on the rim of Jezero Crater preserve a roughly 4-billion-year-old cosmic “weather report” from the solar system’s most dynamic era.
