Tag Archives: alien

For a desert, there’s a bunch of cool science news coming out of the Atacama — no dry spell here. We just heard about a pterosaur fossil, found in the Atacama in a place that was once ocean, that provides evidence the flying reptiles were distributed throughout Gondwana. Now astrophysicists …

The sky is full of stars, and for the first time in human history, we know what’s orbiting some of them. There are more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets, but just a few have been directly imaged. A young gas giant called PDS 70c is one of them, and now astronomers …

  Rocket Lab has seen modest success with its petite Electron booster in the three years since its maiden flight. There have been a few setbacks, to be sure, but the little rocket that could has its sights set on a very timely target. Rocket Lab might be the first …

Life as we know it requires liquid water, and until recently that seemed to be in short supply outside of Earth. However, recent studies of Mars and several moons have pointed to the presence of water. In fact, some moons may contain subsurface oceans with a larger total volume of …

Astronomers have been puzzling over fast radio bursts (FRB) for the last decade, but there’s not yet any good explanation of these high-energy radio blips. Less that two dozen FRBs have been observed since then, all of which come from outside the Milky Way galaxy. Now that fast radio bursts …

Astronomers have found a great many exoplanets out there among the stars, but one thing they have not found is exomoons. There’s no evidence of moons orbiting any of the planets we’ve found orbiting other stars, and it’s not clear why. Moons are obviously common in our solar system — …

In a paper published in the journal Cretaceous Research, Oregon State University researchers described a never-before-seen insect species found in a piece of 100-million-year-old amber excavated from a mine in Myanmar (previously known as Burma). Aethiocarenus burmanicus in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. The specimen originated from the Noije Bum 2001 Summit …

If there’s one modern astronomical concept that has successfully permeated the mainstream media, it’s the “Goldilocks zone.” Not only is it associated with the search for alien life, one of the more popular topics in science, it’s also broadly evocative and easy to understand. To host life, a planet can’t …

In our quest to image exoplanets, we have to contend with one major inconvenience: the telescope-blinding light from their host stars. On earth, people just slap on a pair of Ray-Bans to block out the light from our sun. But we can’t exactly put sunglasses on telescopes, at least not …

  Another day, another Alienware review. It seems that for the sake of variety I’m going to have to start contacting some other companies to get other machines in for review. But anyway, Alienware have sent over their fifth revision of the Aurora, one of their high-end machines. Having spent …