The How and Why of Planet Nine

It hasn’t been found yet – let me make that clear.  But with evidence that it should exist, astronomers are looking more closely at the proposed planet nine and how it might have formed, and how it could have ended up in such a distant orbit. When you start to think about how a planet ten times the mass of Earth could have ended up more than ten times as far from the Sun as Neptune, a few scenarios pop into mind: It was formed in the inner solar system, where interactions with gas giants or another star pulled it out It formed...

Volcanoes on the ‘Home World of Women’

Woman got the worse deal when author John Gray wrote a book titled ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.’  The point he was clearly making was about the communication issues between the sexes, but men definitely got the better deal in home worlds.  For one, Mars is kind of cold, has polar ice caps, is covered in rust and dust, has been pretty dead inside for millions of years, and is bombarded with radiation from the Sun (you can draw your own parallels to men yourself).  But Venus, with its 400 degree Celsius temperature, sulphuric acid rain, incredibly...

Solitary Supernova in Vast Intergalactic Space

A supernova is the only event in existence that happens on both astronomical and human scales (If you think of others – tell me).  It involves a massive stellar explosion and release of energy that can match the output of an entire galaxy, yet this release happens in the blink of a cosmic eye, about two weeks.  For all that could live in the incredibly vast amounts of empty space between galaxies, a supernova is a great indicator that stars do in fact inhabit this space.  Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that two such supernovae have been discovered. In...