Space

When a space hurricane was unleashed from the sun on January 7 2014, space-weather centers around the world sent out warnings. The hurricane was heading directly for Earth and was predicted to produce a strong geomagnetic storm. But then an unexpected thing happened: the storm bypassed Earth and headed for Mars instead. It confirmed that our techniques for predicting such events are not as accurate as we would like. I am one of the co-authors of a new paper that provides an insight into why the predictions were wrong and what we can do about this in future. Space storms are a regular part…

Many people worry about the possibility of the end of all life on our planet. However, the Earth is by far the most habitable planet in our solar system and there's no reason to expect that to change for hundreds of millions of years. The Earth may become uninhabitable between 500 million and a billion years from now. That may seem a short time, when you compare it with the billions of years the Earth has evolved for. But compared with the length of time there have been humans on the Earth it's a very long time. To get an idea of who may need to deal with this issue, the idea is, to look at…

Many ETs are non technological. Like parrots or elephants, or dogs just not physically easily capable of making complex things however much they want to. Or live in sub surface oceans like Europa - if they live in the sea that also makes them likely to be non technological e.g. can't use fire easily. And may not know that the rest of the universe exists. Such an ET could even live in our solar system. We could have ETIs in the subsurface oceans of Europa, Ganymede, Titan and Encladus and if they were non technological we'd have no idea at all that they exist, and they wouldn't know that we…

If you lived on one of Pluto's moons, you might have a hard time determining when, or from which direction, the sun will rise each day. Two of Pluto's moons, Nix and Hydra, wobble unpredictably, according to a new data analysis. The moons wobble because they're embedded in a gravitational field that shifts constantly. This shift is created by the double planet system of Pluto and Charon as they whirl about each other. Pluto and Charon are called a double planet because they share a common center of gravity located in the space between the bodies. Their variable gravitational field sends the…

When Curiosity's successor and the ExoMars rover land on Mars around 2021, we will see two different approaches to the search for life on the planet side by side. NASA's mission is the first stage of a sample return program. The ESAs ExoMars rover (in partnership with Russia) will explore Mars in situ for biosignatures as well as drill two meters below the surface. Which is the best approach?  A sample return would be great for geology. But would it help with the search for life on Mars? Or is it more of a technology demo for this? NASA's decision was based on the last planetary science…

NaSt1, about 3,000 light years away, was discovered a few decades ago and identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, a rapidly evolving star that is much more massive than our Sun. Wolf-Rayet stars lose their hydrogen-filled outer layers quickly, exposing a super-hot and extremely bright core where helium is fusing into heavier elements. Typically, Wolf-Rayet stars have two outward flowing lobes of material, but in this case, the Hubble observations revealed a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star. This vast disk is more than 3 billion billion kilometers wide. It seems to have formed in the…

A remote galaxy shining with infrared light equal to more than 300,000,000,000,000 suns has been discovered using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE. The galaxy, belongs to a new class of objects nicknamed extremely luminous infrared galaxies, or ELIRGs. The galaxy, known as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, may have a behemoth black hole at its belly, gorging itself on gas, but is certainly the most luminous discovered to-date. Supermassive black holes grow by drawing gas and matter into a disk around them. The disk heats up to beyond-sizzling temperatures of millions of…

Our solar system started as a disk of microscopic dust, gas, and ice around the young Sun and the amazing diversity of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets came from this primitive dust.  NASA's Stardust mission has returned to Earth with samples of comet Wild 2, a comet that originated outside the orbit of Neptune and was subsequently kicked closer to Earth's orbit in 1974 when Jupiter's gravity altered Wild 2's orbit.  Scientists have believed that everything it brought back from the comet would be either this primitive dust or circumstellar grains - rocks and minerals that…

This is a question that is frequently asked on Quora, with a different date each time. We get a fair number of quite worried people asking this question, in all seriousness, concerned that Earth is about to be hit by a giant impactor. Sometimes they have read sensational stories by online papers that should know later. It is easy to keep up to date with potential impact dates by visiting this page, automatically updated for the Sentinel program: Current Impact Risks. Just look and see if there are any entries coloured orange or red. Then look for the predicted date of impact. So far…

Many discussions of extra terrestrial intelligences suppose vastly superior intelligences, that think of us like ants. And show no compassion for us, don't even notice us. So - first of all I think there is no particular reason for ETIs to be more intelligent than us. They could easily be less intelligent. But also - if they did treat us as like ants, then they'd be in need of help from us. Many discussions of extra terrestrial intelligences suppose vastly superior intelligences, that think of us like ants. And show no compassion for us, don't even notice us. So - first of all I think…