Binary stars can be chaotic places for planets, and for years that chaos pushed many searches toward calmer, single suns. Now a team has flipped the script. By singling out 591 “edge-on” twin-star systems identified with Gaia data, researchers argue that these complicated neighborhoods may actually be the easiest places to find new worlds. Their ...
We treat oxygen like the star of biology, but for most of Earth’s history it was barely a cameo. Long before forests greened the continents, microbes thrived by shuttling electrons into minerals, acids, and salts that would sound more at home in a chemistry set than a lung. Today, as we scan other worlds, a ...
It’s one of the most audacious questions of our time: not just whether we can go, but whether we can stay. The difference between a flag-planting visit and a permanent foothold is the difference between a camping trip and building a town. Scientists are now testing hardware, biology, and human limits in a coordinated push ...
On the longest human timescales we can imagine, our night sky is not fixed at all – it is already in motion toward a cosmic crash. Astronomers have known for more than a century that the Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy are edging closer together, but in the past decade that vague ...
Walk outside on a clear night, look up, and remind yourself of this unsettling fact: almost everything you can see is the cosmic equivalent of a rounding error. Stars, planets, glowing gas, galaxies, you and me – all of it together makes up only a tiny sliver of the universe’s true contents. The rest ...
It sounds simple: measure the gap between our blue world and the star that keeps it alive. Yet the answer hides inside moving targets, rippling heat, and a clock that never ticks at a constant pace. Scientists pin the average distance near one astronomical unit, a tidy figure that anchors spaceflight, climate science, and our ...
Space doesn’t just loom above us – it has stamped its fingerprints into our rocks, oceans, climate, and even the length of our day. Scientists now read those marks like a case file, tracing cataclysms and quiet nudges that steered Earth’s story long before we arrived. What emerges is part thriller, part user’s manual for ...
They stream through your body by the trillion every second, yet you will never see one, touch one, or feel one. For most of the history of physics, these “ghost particles” were little more than a mathematical whisper, a speculative fix to a puzzle about missing energy. Now, in the early twenty–first century, scientists ...
On a wind-bitten summit in northern Chile, a new eye has opened and the sky has started to move. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory – freshly outfitted with the world’s largest astronomical camera – has shifted from a dream to a working machine, capturing its first on-sky images in 2024 and pushing into an intense ...
For more than a century, astronomers have been measuring how quickly the universe is flying apart, quietly assuming that with better telescopes and cleaner data, all the numbers would eventually agree. Instead, the opposite is happening. New observations, from ultra-precise space telescopes to clever uses of exploding stars and gravitational waves, are sharpening a ...
Nelleke van Niekerk, BSc Food Science (Biochemistry)
