"Is it possible that our mix of small, rocky worlds, ice giants and gas giants in circular outer orbits really is an exception in the galaxy?"

"Without the explosions of supernovae, the heavy elements so essential to life itself would be unavailable, and stars would lack the raw materials to form planets ( Read more... )

Perhaps another room?

Observations of a binary pulsar system confirm expected predictions.

More.

Is four-dimensional space-time an emergent property?

I've been a little behind on my space blog reading, but I wanted to mention a couple of cool articles. It may now be possible to pinpoint a star about to go super nova a couple of hours in advance of the event by detecting an increased presence of UV photons. That's not a whole lot of time on a cosmic scale, but catching these events in the act ( Read more... )

Be sure to read the linked Scientific American article as well as all of the comments.

And you thought black holes merging was cool? Check this out.

The possibility of life right next door? That would be awesome. Of course I don't know how much faith to put in the computer models predicting that there could be rocky earth like planets in the habitable zone . . . most of the exosolar planets that have been detected have been gas giants ( Read more... )

Maybe we don't have all the math down for gravity just yet.