Skip 39 light-years across our galaxy, and you’ll arrive at
Trappist-1, an ultracool dwarf star with a band of special
followers. This dim star hosts seven Earth-like planets within its
habitable zone, according to a study published today in the...
Not just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could
potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star
not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to
search for signs of alien life outside the solar system. The...
What causes split-second blasts of radio waves that appear in
the sky from billions of light years away? Astronomers, including
Shrinivas Kulkarni,
Member (1993–94, 1998) and Visitor (2007) in the School of Natural
Sciences, find that a discovery...
New research by Frederick Hamann, and former School of Natural
Sciences Members Nadia
Zakamska, Donald
Schneider, Jenny Greene,
and Michael Strauss,
describes the discovery of a unique new population of extremely red
quasars. The findings were...
The Gaia spacecraft, which was launched in late 2013 by the
European Space Agency, is on a mission to chart the heavens in
unprecedented detail. By the end of its five-year-long run it will
pinpoint the positions of one billion stars in the sky with...
A recently discovered ultra-faint dwarf galaxy is sending
astronomers clues about the makeup of dark matter in the
neighborhood of the Milky Way. It is one more clue that a type of
stellar object called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs)
are...
Scientists who in February announced their landmark discovery of
these ripples in spacetime revealed today that they had detected
more—again caused by a pair of crashing black holes. This second
find shows that the initial discovery was not a rare...
Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus
in the School of Natural Sciences, examines The Most Wanted Man
in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State by
Fang Lizhi, in The New York
Review of Books. Lizhi, a Member in the School of
Natural...
