Robert Lea

1 day ago | space.com | Robert Lea

Astronomers may have caught the first stages of planets being born around infant stars. The discovery came about when a team of scientists studied 78 planet-forming, flattened clouds of gas and dust, or "protoplanetary disks," in the Ophiuchus star-forming region. This stellar nursery, also known as the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, is located around 460 light-years from Earth, making it the closest star-forming region to our solar system.

1 day ago | space.com | Robert Lea

The key to determining which planets could host extraterrestrial life could be growing in the harshest deserts of Earth in the form of lichen. The secret to this discovery: the "world's best sunscreen."That's according to scientists who have found that lichen in the Mojave Desert managed to survive for 3 months under levels of intense radiation from the sun that had previously been considered lethal to this organism.

2 days ago | livescience.com | Robert Lea

Astronomers have witnessed a distant supermassive black hole devouring its surrounding matter so rapidly that it is "burping" out excess mass at nearly a third of the speed of light. The discovery was made when researchers studied the supermassive-black-hole-powered Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) of a Seyfert galaxy located about 1.2 billion light-years away. The black hole, designated PG1211+143, has a mass around 40 million times that of the sun and powers a bright quasar.

2 days ago | space.com | Robert Lea

The Fantastic Four: First Steps | Final Trailer | Only in Theaters July 25 - YouTubeWatch On With exactly one month to go before Fantastic Four: First Steps is released on July 25, the final trailer for the movie is here! The trailer for the hotly anticipated next entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe features more Galactus, more Franklin, and more of the brotherly ribbing between Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm that has kept comic readers entertained since 1961.

2 days ago | space.com | Robert Lea

After three years of helping astronomers investigate known planets beyond the solar system, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered its first new planet. The extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," which has been designated TWA 7b, also happens to have the lowest mass of any planet that has been directly imaged beyond the solar system.