While sitting in the front of a canoe on a twisty Alaska creek, my daughter asked to steer closer to the riverbank. She wanted to grab some suds. There, caught in the elbows of fallen trees, were quivering mounds of white foam. Foam is floating on most Alaska waterways this summer. Years ago, when I […]
Through a computer-simulated study, astronomers at Lund University in Sweden show that it is highly likely that the so-called Planet 9 is an exoplanet. This would make it the first exoplanet to be discovered inside our own solar system. The theory is that our sun, in its youth some 4.5 billion years ago, stole Planet […]
In a rare cosmic occurrence, Mercury has begun to move across the sun. It’s called the transit of Mercury, and it started at around 7 a.m. local time in Washington. During the event, the smallest planet will move across the sun for about 7.5 hours. The last transit was in 2006, and the next one […]
Earlier this year scientists presented evidence for Planet Nine, a Neptune-mass planet in an elliptical orbit 10 times farther from our Sun than Pluto. Since then theorists have puzzled over how this planet could end up in such a distant orbit. New research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) examines a number […]