The Star Wars franchise depicted the fictitious “Death Star,” a moon-sized space station capable of firing concentrated beams of radiation across space. Even something as menacing as the Death Star, however, is outmatched by a recently discovered super massive black hole, which is pumping out a stream of particles three times longer than the diameter […]

Astronomy abandons our intuitions about the nature of the universe somewhere between the horizon of a black hole and its singularity. Although black holes don’t exactly seem hospitable to life, a new analysis by Tomáš Opatrný of Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, claims black holes may be able to provide life-sustaining energy to orbiting […]

Although astronomers are currently looking for extraterrestrial life, it’s not known whether space aliens would be friendly or hostile to Earthlings. In the event humanity needs to hide its presence, astronomers have figured out a way to shield Earth from alien observers. Astronomers search for Earth-like planets by looking for light dips that imply a […]

One of the greatest challenges of space travel is to figure out a way to cross long distances in a short amount of time. With directed energy propulsion – a propulsion system that involves using a photon driver to push a spacecraft near light speed – this feet could be bridged. Directed energy propulsion isn’t […]

Space, the final frontier. Folks like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and a thousand others in between and around NASA, are spending millions to hewn the road to space. Included in this mix is a young visionary from California named Justin Lewis-Weber. He’s not aiming for Mars, however. He’s proposing a plan to increase solar energy to planet Earth. How? Just put solar […]

I look at rocks on Mars for a living—a lot of rocks. Because of this, I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing what to expect and what not to expect when analyzing the chemical make-up of a Martian rock. You expect to find lots of basalt, the building block of all planets. (Article by Nina Lanza) What […]

The detection of gravitational waves last February launched a wave of excitement in the astronomical community. Surfing on the tale end of the discovery, two Spain physicists believe the detection of gravitational waves could in turn help researchers detect cosmic strings, hypothetical one-dimensional subatomic particles that constitute the fabric of reality. Whenever astronomers look out […]

A team of researchers at Cornell University has built and run a simulation that showed prebiotic reactions could possibly occur on the surface of one of Saturn’s moons, Titan, suggesting the possibility of life evolving in a place where it is too cold for water to be a factor. In their paper published in Proceedings […]

Doomsday is a lot closer than you might think, but don’t worry; scientists have contrived a variety of possible ways we might be able to survive the impending apocalypse. Although the sun isn’t expected to burn out for another 6 billion years, astronomers believe in about 500 million years, the gradual swelling of the sun […]

Extraterrestrial life may flash out of existence as quickly as it flashes into existence, according to astrobiologists from ANU Research School of Earth Sciences. In an effort to understand how life might have originated, the researchers hypothesize that life quickly dies out as soon as it develops due to the runaway heating or cooling of […]

The universe is expanding faster than expected and scientists speculate the finding may be explained by a mysterious force called dark radiation. Key points Universe is expanding 5 – 9 per cent faster than previously estimated Expansion could be caused by weird things happening with dark energy or dark matter Or a mysterious force known […]

Mass extinctions, events where a significantly large number of species go extinct, have occurred five times throughout Earth’s history. Although extinction is part of the natural evolutionary process, some suspect a ninth planet lurking on the edges of the solar system may be responsible for the wave of mass extinctions to sandblast the planet. New […]

NASA has detected oxygen in the upper Martian atmosphere with the help of an instrument on board the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Oxygen had been discovered on the red planet before; however, this is the first time its presence has been verified in wake of the Viking and Mariner missions more than 40 […]

Scientists have been long obfuscated by the mechanisms that allowed life to blossom. One of the great debates in the study of the origin of life, abiogenesis, is whether the building blocks of life arose spontaneously or were seeded here from elsewhere. Now, a group of researchers at the National Centre for Scientific Research in […]

A fuel-free engine that appears to violate the known laws of physics has made headlines once again. Mike McCulloch, a lecturer at Plymouth University in the UK, recently put a hypothesis on the table that attempts to explain how the engine propels itself based upon a new theory of inertia. The engine, known as the […]