A team of astrophysicists, cosmologists, and physicists has developed a novel way to compute the Hubble constant using gravitational waves. As our capability to observe gravitational waves improves in the future, this new method could be used to make even more accurate measurements of the Hubble constant, bringing scientists closer to resolving the Hubble tension.
When people think of supernova explosions, they're most-often thinking of Type II core-collapse supernovae, where a massive star becomes a red supergiant before collapsing on itself and exploding. New research uncovers what's going on inside the star before it explodes, and explains why SNe light curves can be different from one another.
On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project all around the United States hurried to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest, greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the Sun’s corona.
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 Earth. But what happens if that life doesn’t stay on an Earth analog? If they, like we, start to move towards their neighboring planets, the idea of a habitable zone becomes much more complicated. A new paper from Dr. Caleb Scharf of the NASA Ames Research Center, and one of the agency’s premier astrobiologists, tries to account for this possibility by introducing the framework of an Interplanetary Habitable Zone (IHZ).
It's hard to turn away from a picture of the Cat's Eye Nebula, even if you've seen it dozens of times. It may be the most visually compelling planetary nebula out there, with its billowing, layered shrouds and its intricate structure. NASA and the ESA have combined images of the Cat's Eye from the Euclid and Hubble space telescopes for a fresh look at a favourite and historical cosmic object.
Red dwarfs make up the vast majority of stars in the galaxy. Such ubiquity means they host the majority of rocky exoplanets we’ve found so far - which in turn makes them interesting for astrobiological surveys. However, there’s a catch - astrobiologists aren’t sure the light from these stars can actually support oxygen-producing life. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Giovanni Covone and Amedeo Balbi, suggests that they might not - when it comes to stellar light, quality is just as important as quantity. And according to their calculations, Earth-like biospheres are incredibly difficult to sustain around red dwarfs.
Panspermia is the idea that life was spread from world to world somehow. New research shows that one type of Earthly extremophile can survive the extremely high pressure from asteroid impacts on Mars, be blasted into space, and maybe even survive the journey to Earth.
