The building blocks of life can, and did, spontaneously assemble under the right conditions. That’s called spontaneous generation, or abiogenesis.
Not too close, but not too far. That’s long been the rule describing how distant a planet should be from its star in order to sustain life. But a new study challenges that adage: A planet can maintain water and other liquids on its surface if it’s heated, not by starlight, but by radioactive decay, researchers calculate. That opens up the possibility for many planets—even free-floating worlds untethered to stars—to host life, they speculate.
The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, accused Donald Trump on Tuesday of creating a basis to take over other planets by signing an executive order outlining U.S. policy on commercial mining in space.
Just as the sun has planets and the planets have moons, our galaxy has satellite galaxies, and some of those might have smaller satellite galaxies of their own. To wit, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a relatively large satellite galaxy visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is thought to have brought at least six of its own satellite galaxies with it when it first approached the Milky Way, based on recent measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.
The finding could affect calculations for how fast the universe is expanding
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface.
Newly-discovered black hole could be the long hoped-for ‘missing link’
The enormous outflows of gas can help explain why galaxies stop making stars
Bacteria live in tiny clay-filled cracks in solid rock millions of years old
A bright X-ray source in a massive star cluster in the outskirts of 6dFGS gJ215022.2-055059, a barred lenticular galaxy located about 806 million light-years away from Earth, is an intermediate-mass black hole, according to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
