Death March Of The Planets Strange things happen among the stars–amazing, unforeseen, and bewildering behavior that both baffles and bewitches those who try to understand the long-held secrets lost in starlight. Mysteries are fun, and solving them can provide an unsurpassed delight. One of the most mesmerizing of stellar mysteries is the weird behavior of … Read more
How Our Solar System Formed: The Answer Is Blowin’ In The Wind Our solitary Sun blasts our daytime sky with its shimmering fires, sending both welcoming warmth and light to Earth. Our Sun, and its familiar family of planets, moons, and smaller objects, emerged about 4.56 billion years ago from jumbled relics left over from … Read more
Galaxies And The Supermassive Black Holes They Host In the deepest, darkest hearts of perhaps every large galaxy in the Universe, including our own Milky Way, supermassive black holes lie in secret, waiting for their dinner–a wrecked star, perhaps, or a cloud of tragic gas. These gravitational beasts are some of the strangest occupants of … Read more
The Most Mysterious Star In The Universe May Not Be So Mysterious Mysteries are fun to solve, and some stars can lead perplexed scientific detectives on a merry chase to solve their myriad mesmerizing mysteries. Such a puzzling star is KIC 8462852, frequently referred to as Tabby’s Star or Royajian’s Star. This strange stellar inhabitant … Read more
Galaxies On The Edge Glittering like a trillion fireflies on a summer’s night, the galaxies of the Universe host a swarming multitude of dazzling stars, and these stellar performers do their strange cosmic dance within an invisible structure called the Great Cosmic Web. This enormous web-like structure is woven of extremely massive, transparent filaments that … Read more
Tiny, Tiny Failed Star: How We Wonder What You Are Bewitching, bewildering brown dwarfs are genuine “oddballs”–and their existence in the Universe presents astronomers with an intriguing mystery to solve. This is because these stellar “failures” challenge the neat distinction between true stars and giant planets. Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that occupy a mass-range … Read more
Stellar Secrets Revealed In Our Galaxy’s Heart Billions of starlit galaxies wander through intergalactic space, and our own large, spiral Milky Way is just like others of its kind. When we look up at a clear night sky, we see a seemingly endless background of blackness, sparkling with the distant furious fires of myriad stars–and … Read more