Water on Earth
Water, the key ingredient for life, is not only abundant on Earth, it is also ubiquitous across the solar system. Either as ice or sometimes as liquid, water has been spotted in comets, ...
Hinode Satellite Captures X-ray Footage of Solar Eclipse
Submitted by idfive
on
Cambridge, MA -
The moon passed between the Earth and the sun on Thursday, Oct. 23. While avid stargazers in North America looked up to watch the spectacle, the best vantage point was ...
Accreting Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe
Submitted by idfive
on
Supermassive black holes containing millions or even billions of solar-masses of material are found at the nuclei of galaxies. Our Milky Way, for example, has a nucleus with a black hole ...
Rediscovering Venus to Find Faraway Earths
Submitted by idfive
on
Astronomers Chih-Hao Li and David Phillips of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics want to rediscover Venus—that familiar, nearby planet stargazers can see with the naked eye m...
Sources of the Solar Wind
Submitted by idfive
on
The solar chromosphere is the region between the Sun’s surface and its hot, million-degree corona. Within this complex interface zone, only a few thousand kilometers deep, the density of...
Tiny "Nanoflares" Might Heat the Sun's Corona
Submitted by idfive
on
Cambridge, MA -
The Debris Disk of a Solar-Type Star
Submitted by idfive
on
Although thousands of exoplanets and hundreds of planetary systems (stars with multiple exoplanets) are now known, astronomers still don’t know whether our solar system is typical. The di...
Stars: The First Three Billion Years
Submitted by idfive
on
In the last decade, the unprecedented sensitivity of astronomical observations has powered a revolution in our understanding of galaxies in the young universe. It is now possible to stud...
Making Super-Telescopes Requires Some Creative Engineering
Submitted by idfive
on
On top of a flattened mountain in Chile's Atacama Desert, one of the world's largest telescopes may help scientists answer the age-old question, "Is there life out there?" Currently under...
The Architecture of Planetary Systems
Submitted by idfive
on
There are 1822 confirmed exoplanets reported so far, and NASA's Kepler satellite has found evidence for more than two thousand others. Many exoplanets are expected to be in systems with ...