You say you’d love a fun science evening? Great, here’s your chance. Scientific American will be co-hosting a tweet-up and reception in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History the evening of Wednesday, January 18. While we expand our minds, we’ll enjoy some cocktails and open access to the Beyond Planet Earth exhibit. Attendance [...]

Astronomers have found water vapour and carbon monoxide, but no methane, in the atmosphere of an alien planet orbiting a star 129 light years away. The star, known as HR 8799, is at the centre of the first planetary system beyond our solar system to be imaged directly, in 2008. The star has at least [...]

Most people are familiar with the pale blue dot image of Earth taken by Voyager in 1990. Its blueness is significant, of course, because it is Earth’s abundant liquid water that makes it look that way. But if you looked at the light that is reflected from Earth carefully, you would see several interesting features. [...]

In five billion years the sun is going to blow up into a red giant, then collapse back down again into a white dwarf – a dying star roughly the same size as Earth itself. All of the solar system planets up to, and including, Earth will probably be vaporised during this stellar ballooning. We’ll [...]

If you think this star system looks a little crowded, that’s because it contains all of the possible alien worlds found by the Kepler planet-hunting mission so far. This animation made by Alex Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, shows all 2299 of the most likely planetary candidates [...]

Mars has always been the toddler of the rocky planet family. With a radius half that of Earth’s and a mass just over one tenth of that of our planet, it is bigger than baby Mercury but not quite as grown up as Earth and Venus. Now it seems that some unruly behaviour on behalf [...]

From atmospheric changes, to timelapse imagery from Google Earth…our planetary presence is hard to miss. This past week has seen the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere reach a level of 400 parts-per-million, a value the planet hasn’t seen since several million years ago. To put this into some kind of context let’s [...]

A new study estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the atmospheric water vapor originating from Earth’s continents comes from plant transpiration rather than simple physical evaporation. This process uses up almost half of the solar energy absorbed by our landmasses and represents a major piece of our terrestrial climate system. There may be implications [...]

Using cutting edge techniques, a team of astronomers has directly imaged a distant system of four planets, and made history by obtaining simultaneous spectra of these worlds. This first comparative look reveals that the objects each have distinct atmospheric compositions, none of which directly match any previously known class of astrophysical body.     Only [...]

It’s been an exciting few days for exoplanetary science. A slew of refined statistical measurements of the abundance of other worlds have made it clearer than ever that our galaxy is crammed with planets. One in six stars should host at least one Earth-sized object in an orbit smaller than that of Mercury, implying that [...]

This year has been a spectacular one for exoplanets. New discoveries and new insights have truly pushed the gateway to other worlds even further open.     In the past 12 months we’ve gained increasingly good statistics on the incredible abundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity. We also finally seem to have [...]

A while back I wrote about a wonderful piece of art-meets-science-meets-the-public called Tweets In Space, the brainchild of Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall. You can read all about this project here. The terrific news is that all systems are go for today, Friday 21st September, as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in [...]

Black holes, black holes, and more black holes. In the past few weeks I’ve been thinking, talking, and even dreaming about black holes (yes really, somnolent thoughts seem well suited to these fantastic objects). Mostly this has been an effect of my book Gravity’s Engines hitting the shelves, but it’s also because barely a day [...]

You may notice that today is the one year anniversary of the Scientific American blog network. You may also notice that across the blogs this morning is a shared theme; time for the readers to speak up. Inspired by the blogger Ed Yong, the Sci Am blogs are asking for your thoughts. Consider this an [...]

  This has been an extraordinary week for planets (moons), exoplanets, and astrobiology. I’m hard pushed to write properly about all these things but sometimes the sheer tidal mass of discoveries tells its own story.       And tidal masses is the first one up. This week new results from the Cassini mission around [...]

Are you sick of reading about the transit of Venus this year? Yes? Me too. But the fact is that when astrophysical objects move between us and something else, like the convenient blaze of a star, there is an extraordinary amount that can be learned. I won’t go far into the delights of a venusian [...]

The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that has already discovered some of the most intriguing exoplanets known has abruptly lost the capacity to carry out its mission, NASA officials announced May 15. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which launched in 2009, relies on an array of flywheels, or reaction-wheel assemblies, to stabilize the pointing of its telescope toward a [...]

Astronomy has a branding problem. It’s an incredibly exciting time for the field, as astronomers are turning up planets orbiting distant stars by the cosmic boatload. But the planets themselves carry dreary names that only a bureaucrat could love. Even the most-studied, best-known planets have names like 51 Pegasi b, HD 209458 b and Alpha [...]

LONG BEACH, Calif.—Yesterday I wrote about the excitement at the American Astronomical Meeting here about new exoplanet discoveries. Scientists working on the Kepler satellite announced the discovery of an additional 461 planet candidates, bringing the total to 2,740. What are these planets like? Alex Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center [...]

Having your planet swallowed by a star is no fun. But some planets might be able to run the astrophysical gauntlet and make it through more or less intact. When a star comparable to or somewhat larger than the sun enters advanced age, it swells up into a red giant, expanding far beyond its original [...]

The European Southern Observatory already has one of the world’s best planet-hunting tools in the HARPS spectrograph. Installed at the 3.6-meter La Silla telescope in Chile, HARPS is an instrument that can detect the extremely subtle wobbles in a star’s motion that may be induced by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. But the [...]

AUSTIN, Texas—Astrophysicists have a funny attitude toward magnetic fields. You might say they feel both repelled and attracted. Gravitation is assumed to rule the cosmos, so models typically neglect magnetism, which for most researchers is just as well, because the theory of magnetism has a forbidding reputation. The basic equations are simple enough, solving them [...]

Times are tough on planet Earth right now, but at least we don’t have a supermassive black hole lurking just over the horizon. A new study suggests that stars near the Milky Way’s central black hole may well form planets. The researchers based their analysis on a very recent discovery of a gas cloud making [...]

“We are really in the age of discovery of new worlds.” That was Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, during a September 12 press conference in which European researchers announced the discovery of about 50 planets new to science. There are now 685 [...]

Late Wednesday night I bumped into an old friend on the subway. It was past 11:00, and she, an actress, was returning from a party at the home of her movement teacher at which each attendee was asked to bring a short performance piece as a gift for the host. I, a science writer, was [...]

Astronomers are probably just a few years from the first-ever finding of an Earth twin outside our solar system, that is, a planet roughly the size of Earth orbiting at a similarly temperate distance from a sunlike star. The idea is that finding Earths outside the solar system just might be a first step toward [...]

5) Star Factory About 880 million years after the Big Bang, a huge galaxy was building new stars at an incredible pace. An international team of astronomers discovered the galaxy HFLS3 with help from 12 observatories all over the world. HFLS3 is a starburst galaxy, which means it turns gas into stars at an extremely [...]