This story popped up yesterday, and I can imagine it will go far, since it talks about life in the universe. I get it, it’s what people are interested in, and at least this story is focused on the science of why this is the best place to look for intelligent civilizations, instead of “Oh hey there’s a strange ring of material around a star, must be an alien superstructure.” But I digress. So where is the best place to look for life in the universe? The answer is in a Globular Cluster. A globular cluster is one of the...
Some of the most gorgeous, ghostly, and variable objects in the universe are planetary nebulae. They are all formed in a similar process, as a low-mass star (like our Sun) sheds it’s outer layers of gas and dust, heating them to a glow as they disperse over hundreds of millions of years. A few Billion years from now, the Sun will undergo the same major state change. When this happens, perhaps other species in the far future will gaze upon it and marvel at its beauty. One of the difficulties in studying a planetary nebula is measuring it’s distance from...
I’m over-stimulated. I literally can’t take it anymore. These images from Pluto are mind-blowing, but with so many incredible photos released over the past week, I have reached my limit. I can no longer contain my excitement(not that I have in the past). Here are the newest images showing a Pluto we have never seen before. This second image is my favorite. It shows so much depth and detail, and reveals Pluto to be a world, far more than just a boring rock occupying the outer reaches of our solar system. Visible in the image is the layered atmosphere, mountain...
We know that solar systems form in a disk shape, with the star forming in the middle and any other rocks, presumably planets, form out from the center in whatever dust and gas remains. But what about the space between stars? Is it truly empty? And if there is something out there, how could we find it? How did it get there? For years, astronomers and chemists (believe it or not) have been trying to answer these questions and more. The specific problem is that when we take a spectrum of a distant star, we see a collection of 400...
Massive star clusters can pop into existence in a matter of a few million years, a very short period of time on astronomical time scales. They consist of hundreds or thousands of massive, bright, hot stars that will live relatively short lives of a few hundred millions of years. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have discovered a vanishingly rare molecular cloud of highly dense gas, containing no stars. It is poised to become a massive star cluster, and we found it in its infancy. “We may be witnessing one of the most ancient and extreme modes of...
