By Amit Malewar Published: April 29, 2026 Collected at: https://www.techexplorist.com/galaxy-common-planets-missing-common-stars/102853/ Around stars like our Sun, the most common planets aren’t giant Jupiters but smaller cousins: sub‑Neptunes, which resemble Neptune but on a reduced scale, and super‑Earths, rocky worlds up to ten times Earth’s mass. For nearly a decade, astronomers have known these two planet types […]

By Carolyn Collins Petersen – April 29, 2026 Collected at: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/how-a-meteorite-helps-explain-mercurys-chemical-makeup Mercury is one of the four rocky planets of the Solar System, yet its chemistry is very different from Earth, Venus, and Mars. Missions to the planet show that it has an iron-poor, but sulfur- and magnesium-rich crust, which has implications for its interior […]

By Mark Thompson – April 28, 2026 Collected at: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/could-light-alone-get-us-to-another-star Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to our own, sitting just over four light years away and it’s fascinated astronomers and storytellers alike for generations. With conventional rockets, reaching it would take hundreds of thousands of years, even for the Orion spacecraft it would […]

By Amit Malewar Published: April 28, 2026 Collected at: https://www.techexplorist.com/paradoxical-phenomenon-optical-physics/102823/ Organized patterns of light in complex systems are key to understanding how light interacts with matter and to developing new ways of shaping light. MIT researchers have uncovered a surprising twist in optical physics: under special conditions, what looks like a chaotic jumble of laser […]

April 27, 2026 by Kyoto University Collected at: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-stars-die.html From birth to death, stars generally slow by 100 to 1,000 times their initial rotation rates; in other words, they “spin down.” The sun’s total angular momentum has declined as material is gradually blown off at the surface as solar wind. By observing this, astronomers have […]

By Evan Gough – April 27, 2026 Collected at: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/young-sun-like-stars-are-not-as-menacing-as-thought Scientists know that the behaviour of stars can dictate planetary habitability. Research shows that young stars emit powerful radiation that can strip planetary atmospheres away. And without an atmosphere, it’s extremely unlikely that life could exist. But of course stars aren’t all the same. Their […]

By American Society for Microbiology April 22, 2026 Collected at: https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-say-this-fungus-could-survive-the-trip-to-mars/ Some Earth-based microbes may be tougher than expected, raising new questions about survival beyond our planet. Scientists have long viewed fungi as tough survivors, but new research suggests some may be capable of enduring an even more extreme test: the journey from Earth to Mars. […]

By Patrick M. Shober, NASA April 26, 2026 Collected at: https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-a-new-meteor-shower-from-a-mysterious-crumbling-asteroid/ A meteor cluster reveals an asteroid disintegrating near the Sun. These observations help uncover hidden asteroids and explain how space objects break apart. Scientists use global camera networks to study meteors, revealing how dust and debris from comets and asteroids behave and evolve in […]

By Carolyn Collins Petersen – April 27, 2026 Collected at: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/scientists-find-peculiar-differences-in-two-uranian-rings The planet Uranus is a weird place. Not only does it roll around the Sun on its side once every 84.3 Earth years, it also sports a spindly set of rings corralled in some places by strange little moons. Two of those rings, the […]

April 24, 2026 by Liu Jia, Chinese Academy of Sciences Collected at: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-aquila-booster-theoretical-limits-particle.html The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) has detected PeV (1015 eV) gamma-ray emission from a pulsar wind nebula powered by PSR J1849-0001 in the constellation Aquila, marking the discovery of a new PeVatron and posing a challenge to the classical theory […]