Two thousand comets a day collide around nearby star Fomalhaut creating a continually replenished dust belt in the outskirts of the star’s system, according to a new paper recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Fomalhaut is a young star. It is twice as massive as the sun and sits 25 light years away [...]

Far from the Sun planetary bodies can hold onto many more moons. The latest count for Pluto is five satellites, and the most recent two need names. Back in 2011 and 2012 it was announced that Hubble Space Telescope observations of the Pluto system had spied first one and then another new candidate moon. For [...]

The range of topics relevant to astrobiology is pretty staggering – from microbial populations, chemistry, geo-chemistry, geobiology, climate, non-linear systems, solar system exploration, robotics, planetary science, exoplanets, astrophysics, and even cosmology. I often call astrobiology an ‘inter-discipline‘, since so much of it is about the connecting threads, the metaphorical synapses between highly specialized areas of [...]