This is another of my articles to help the many people who come to my science blog saying how scared they are of a planet, which they think is hidden behind the sun and is about to fly past or hit…

According to new work published recently the TRAPPIST-1 planets could have an atmosphere hospitable to life as we know it. Could that life be intelligent and technological if it is there?  Sadly…

We might get our first humans living long term on the Moon by the 2020s. How will they cope with lunar gravity, and will it need to be augmented, and if so, how? There is a lot written about…

Imagine a planet where you experience constant daylight or even triple sunrises and sunsets each day, because the seasons last longer than human lifetimes.  That's the case with HD 131399Ab,…

If conditions had been just a little different an eon ago, there might be plentiful life on Venus and none on Earth. In Astrobiology, researchers note that minor evolutionary changes could have…

Researchers have discovered a type of dune on Mars intermediate in size between tiny ripples and wavier dunes, and unlike anything seen on Earth. Because dunes can be preserved in rock over time,…

Roughly 90 percent of the biggest black holes are dormant, meaning that they are not actively devouring matter and therefore not giving off any light or other radiation. Yet dormant is not dead, so…

Venus has an "electric wind" strong enough to remove the components of water from its upper atmosphere, which may have played a significant role in stripping Earth's twin planet of its oceans,…

Chiral molecules, compounds that come in otherwise identical mirror image variations, like a pair of human hands--are crucial to life as we know it. Living things are selective about which "…

In the race towards the discovery of another planet in our solar system, the ninth or tenth depending on how seriously you take the 2 percent of astronomers who demoted Pluto, scientists are striving…