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More than 5,000 planets have been discovered beyond our solar system, allowing scientists to explore planetary evolution and consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Now, a UC Riverside study published in Physical Review D suggests that these “exoplanets” could also serve as tools to investigate dark matter. The researchers examined how dark matter, which makes…

NASA research has shown that cell-like compartments called vesicles could form naturally in the lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan. Titan is the only world apart from Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface. However, Titan’s lakes and seas are not filled with water. Instead, they contain liquid hydrocarbons like ethane and methane….

Ali Abbas AhmadiBBC News, Toronto Canadian Space Agency A computer generated image of what the lunar vehicle could look like on the Moon In a shopping plaza an hour outside Toronto, flanked by a day spa and a shawarma joint, sits a two-storey building with blue tinted windows reflecting the summer sun. It is the…

In 2009, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released a captivating image: a pulsar and its surrounding nebula that is shaped like a hand. i> X-rays from Chandra have been combined with radio data obtained by the Australian Telescope Compact Array to reveal new structures. At the center of this image is a pulsar, a rapidly spinning…

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have spotted a contradiction in worldwide wildfire trends: Despite a 26 percent decline in total burned area from 2002 to 2021, the number of people exposed to wildfires has surged by nearly 40 percent. The study, published on August 21 in Science, revealed another statistic that…

 As Great Salt Lake’s levels continue to sag, yet another strange phenomenon has surfaced, offering Utah scientists more opportunities to plumb the vast saline lake’s secrets. Phragmites-covered mounds in recent years have appeared on the drying playa off the lake’s southeast shore. After several years of scratching their heads, University of Utah geoscientists, deploying a…

A new Stanford study challenges the decades-old view that the rise of land plants half a billion years ago dramatically changed the shapes of rivers. Rivers generally come in two styles: braided, where multiple channels flow around sandy bars, and meandering, where a single channel cuts S-curves across a landscape. Geologists have long thought that…