(Natural News) A new study published in the Physical Review Letters suggests that the remnant cores of dead average-size stars can explode like a nuclear bomb. Known as white dwarfs, these dense cores are packed with heavy radioactive elements called actinides that can spontaneously undergo nuclear fission – the splitting of atoms. Depending on certain conditions, these cores can eventually undergo uncontrolled fission, […]

(Natural News) The sun has uncorked its biggest solar flare in more than three years, erupting on Nov. 29 with an enormous release of plasma and a magnetic field called a coronal mass ejection. SpaceWeather reported that the solar flare registered as an M4.4 on the scale used to measure solar storms. Solar flares, which are sudden, bright explosions of […]

(Natural News) Researchers from the U.S. and Germany have uncovered two dozen exoplanets that may be better at supporting life than Earth. Exoplanets, celestial bodies that orbit a star other than the sun, are found everywhere in the cosmos. Some of them are located in the orbital region around a star, called the liquid water habitable zone, where planets could have […]

(Natural News) If Venusian life does exist, it may have originated from Earth: An interplanetary hopper hitched a ride with an asteroid that grazed Earth’s upper atmosphere and landed on Venus. Researchers from Harvard University — astronomy professor Avi Loeb and student Amir Siraj — proposed the idea after a group of scientists recently detected signatures of phosphine. Microorganisms […]

(Natural News) An SUV-sized asteroid made the closest known flyby by such an object to Earth on Saturday, August 15. It flew over the southern Indian Ocean during its nearest dip into the atmosphere. Astronomers, however, only detected it six hours after its closest approach to Earth. Scientists at the Palomar Observatory in California were the first to […]

(Natural News) Venus may have once harbored oceans two to three billion years ago, suggests a study presented at the Joint Meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. Researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies ran five simulations of the planet’s […]

(Natural News) Scientists detect exoplanets by analyzing light from the planets themselves or their stars. This method led to the discovery of thousands of worlds within the Milky Way, but none beyond the galaxy. That could change, suggests a recent study, with the use of gravitational waves – invisible ripples in space and time that travel at the speed of light. […]

(Natural News) Meteorites taken from the Thorsberg quarry in Sweden suggest that violent collisions occurred in space about 470 million years ago, flinging rapidly traveling meteorites toward Earth. Birger Schmitz of Lund University in Sweden is leading the research on the meteorites aged millions of years old. His team’s findings, published in the journal Nature, show that the meteorites hold […]

(Natural News) Astronomers have found an exoplanet – a planet located outside of the Solar System – that they believe may be capable of supporting life. An international group of astronomers made the discovery with the help of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Dubbed a “super-Earth,” the exoplanet was found in the Hydra constellation, […]

(Natural News) The origin of gold and other heavy elements has always been a mystery. A recent study by American researchers suggests that they were byproducts of a collision between two neutron stars billions of years ago. The researchers believe that their findings, which appeared in the journal Nature, provide unique insight into planetary history. Where […]