Space News & Blog Articles

In summer 2022, just weeks after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operating, astronomers noticed something unexpected rather strange, tiny red objects scattered across the sky that had never been seen before. These "little red dots" appeared extremely compact and red, emitting light primarily in the mid-infrared, at these wavelengths the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't detect them but JWST was perfectly designed for the purpose.

According to every experiment, the constants of nature appear to be constant.

While plate tectonics may not be absolutely necessary for life, they may be necessary for a technological civilization to arise. Habitability may be possible on a static world, but habitability probably won't persist long enough for a technological civilization like ours to appear. Plate tectonics regulates our planet's climate, and without it, atmospheric CO2 would rise to catastrophic levels.

Stellar black holes form from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives, typically weighing 3 to 50 times the mass of the Sun. When a star runs out of fuel, it explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a region so dense that nothing can escape, not even light. Primordial black holes, by contrast, are theoretical objects that could have formed less than a second after the Big Bang from extremely dense regions of the early universe. Unlike stellar black holes, they could be much lighter and are ancient relics from when the universe contained mostly hydrogen and helium.

What are the most important constants of nature? Of course physicists debate about which of the constants are the important ones, because physicists debate EVERYTHING. Some lists have 19 numbers, some have more. Some try to build categories of numbers, like really really fundamental constants, less fundamental but still important constants, and…others. Some say that the only REAL constants are the ones that don’t have any units, the ones that are just bare numbers, like the fine structure constant. Others…well, others disagree.

Protoplanets are celestial objects in the act of forming into full planets within the gas and dust disks surrounding hot, young stars. These objects, often several times the mass of Jupiter, are still embedded in their birth environments, actively feeding on surrounding material through their own circumplanetary disks. Unlike mature planets, protoplanets offer a rare glimpse into the violent, chaotic processes of planetary formation, revealing how the worlds we see today form.