The drive the get more women involved in science should start at an early age. But as one space researcher found out, girls can get nudged out of science at school.
Spiral galaxy NGC 3953 is a veritable star making machine, but why do some galaxies stop forming new stars?
NASA-Sloan Atlas
A look at some of the more obscure methods astronomers use to detect planets around other stars, in the second of a two-part series on finding world’s elsewhere in the universe.
In the Exoplanet Era, we are learning that planets abound in the cosmos.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
Astronomers have discovered more than 3,000 planets around other stars, so far. In the first of a two-part series we look at how they find world’s elsewhere in the universe.
An artist’s concept of select planetary discoveries made to date by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
NASA/W. Stenzel
The number of known exoplanets doubled this week to more than 3,200. But why have only a handful of these those new planets caught people’s imagination?
Imagined view from the surface of one of the newly discovered planets, with ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 in the background.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
We don’t need to look for Earth-like planets exclusively around Sun-like stars. Tiny, dim TRAPPIST-1 has only 11 percent the diameter of the Sun and is much redder.
All is not calm in the cosmos.
ESA/Hubble and NASA
Stargazing seems such a quiet, calm activity. But whether our eyes can see or not, those stars out there are in constant flux. Time-domain astronomy studies how cosmic objects change with time.
Are we soon to visit Alpha Centauri (left)?
Skatebiker/ Wikipedia
Building a tiny starship may be doable. The big challenge will be making sure it survives all the hazards in interstellar space.
An artist’s illustration of Kappa Ceti whose stellar winds are 50 times stronger than our sun’s. Any Earth-like planet would need a magnetic field to protect its atmosphere if it was to stand a chance of hosting life.
M. Weiss/CfA
Extragalactic astrophysicists want to know how and why galaxies stop forming stars, change their shape and fade away. With help from citizen scientists, they’re figuring it out.
Latest observations suggest that cometary dust could be blocking light from strangely twinkling star.
NASA
They’re are the overachievers of the universe: incredibly dense but very small when compared to others stars. So how much do we know about the extreme behaviour of neutron stars?
Hurricane Arthur photographed by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst.
ESA/NASA
Astronauts living on the ISS get to experience the wonders of the universe’s natural phenomena like no one else.
A colour image of G63349, one of the galaxies in the survey, created using near-infrared (VISTA telescope) and optical (Sloan telescope) data collated by the GAMA survey. (The bright green object is a nearby star.)
ICRAR/GAMA