A water world ruled by octopus-like creatures.
A planet divided by light and dark where the sun never rises.
And a lava hell where molten rock rains from the sky.
These are not descriptions of foreign worlds in science fiction novels, these are some of the ‘exoplanets’ most likely to be harboring aliens right now.
Dozens of these exoplanets – planets that orbit stars outside our solar system – which have been classified as ‘potentially habitable’ or ‘Earth-like’ have been
WILLS POINT, Texas — Splish-splash. The moment the sun went behind the moon, the snapping turtles all simultaneously slipped into the waters of Lake Tawakoni. Twilight painted the world. Clouds raced across the sky. Just beside the moon-covered sun sat bright Jupiter, shining in the middle of the day. Most birds and insects had grown hushed or gone completely silent.
It’s hard to fully encapsulate the feeling of a total solar eclipse; how it changes the quality of the
The town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, doesn’t have a lot to say for itself. Its Web site, which features a photo of a flowering tree next to a rusty bridge, notes that the town is “conveniently located between Asheville and Boone.” According to the latest census data, it has 2,332 residents and a population density of 498.1 per square mile. A recent story in the local newspaper concerned the closing of the Hardee’s on Highway 19E; this followed an
The Antarctic is turning from a fridge for the world – keeping temperatures down – to ‘a radiator’, scientists warned yesterday.
Ice on land and sea in the Antarctic would normally reflect the sun’s rays back into space, but as water forms ponds and lakes on Antarctica, this absorbs heat.
Professor Martin Siegert said the South Pole continent ‘is an enormous, vast white surface…it does an enormous job for the planet in terms of a lot of solar radiation bounced
Now sharks could become even angrier after the world’s oceans have hit their highest recorded surface temperature, according to scientists.
Copernicus, the EU’s weather service, revealed yesterday that the sea surface temperatures reached an
NASA has lost contact with the legendary Voyager 2 spacecraft after “inadvertently” sending it a command that caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth.
The error means that Voyager 2, which launched in 1977 and is currently around 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, is unable to receive commands or transmit data back to mission controllers.
“This change has interrupted communication between Voyager 2 and the
One of the big open questions about Earth and how life formed here is where the planet’s water came from. Water is essential to life as we know it, but many scientists think that water did not originally form on Earth — rather, it may have been carried here by asteroids. Recently, though, astronomers have discovered water vapor in the planet-forming region of a star, suggesting that future planets which form here might have access to water right from the
If you’re looking to visit a gas giant planet in another solar system — or if you’re simply a science fiction writer who needs such a world for your story — you’d better steer clear of little red stars.
A search for planets like Jupiter around low-mass red dwarf stars came up empty, researchers report in the July Astronomical Journal. “Around 200 stars, we did not detect a single one of these planets,” says Emily Pass, an astronomer at
Get ready to brace for impact because an astrologer has warned that this Mercury retrograde may cause extra mayhem – since it is taking place during the eclipse season.
Roughly four times a year, for a three-week period, Mercury goes into retrograde – which means that it appears to stop and go backwards in the sky – and during that time, many people believe that the planet’s movements can make things in their life go amiss.
From getting fired at
Rocky planets might have been forming since the beginning of the universe. A stellar nursery in a neighboring galaxy has the right materials for such planet formation, researchers report April 24 in Nature Astronomy.
The overall chemical makeup of the tiny galaxy, called the Small Magellanic Cloud, is akin to that of the early universe. The finding suggests that rocky planets might have been able to develop in the relatively pristine chemical environment that pervaded the cosmos just a
