As scientists continue to explore the Earth, they’re discovering life, surviving and even thriving in extreme environments. What hints can this give us about what we might find as we search for live on other worlds.
Astronomers are finding even more new extrasolar planets and they’re starting to discover entirely new categories.
How did we get from plain old hydrogen to our current diversity? It came from stars, in fact successive generations of stars.
This time we’re going to talk about Pluto, its moons, the Kuiper belt, and the other icy objects that inhabit the outer Solar System.
So with a sample of asteroid Bennu firmly inside OSIRIS-REx’s return capsule, it’s time to bring this treasure home. But it’s not the only sample return mission out there, with Japan’s Hayabusa II mission also bringing asteroid debris home. So today, let’s talk about the missions and what we’ve learned so far.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three brilliant researchers who worked out some of the secrets of black holes. Today we’re going to talk about the chain of discoveries that led to this award.
Now, we know there are stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes, but how do you get from one to the other? How do black holes get more massive?
This week we gather up all the left over ways that stars partially or fully explode or don’t. Probably. Enjoy!
In some situations even dead stars can get exciting again, briefly becoming some of the brightest objects in the Universe. And maybe, just maybe, the last exciting thing that’ll ever happen in the Universe.
Stars die. At some point in the next few billion years or so our Sun is going to start heating up, using up all the fuel in its core, and then eventually die, becoming a white dwarf. It’ll then slowly cool down to the background temperature of the Universe, becoming a black dwarf. Let’s learn about this fascinating process.