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A 6 year old girl, Cara Lucy O'Connor, has a concern. Pluto was one of the nine planets in the solar system, and since 2006 it isn't anymore. That’s not working with a little 6 year old girl. That’s not right says the little girl from Ireland. So Cara, with the assistance of her teacher, sent a letter to NASA wanting to convince the space agency to “make Pluto a planet again.” Cara wrote in the letter “I listened to a song and at the end of it the song said “Bring Pluto Back” — and I would really like that to happen,” She went on to clarify that in 2006, Pluto was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet, “a type of planet that isn't big enough to clear its orbit.” She spoke about the Kuiper belt, a doughnut-shaped ring beyond Neptune where many dwarf planets are situated. She wrote: “I really think Pluto should be a main planet again like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus & Neptune, because in one video I watched called 'Let's go meet the plan...

A team led by NASA has found evidence of an enigmatic planet whose properties are so peculiar and unusual, that it brings into question everything astronomers know about these types of planets. Planet WASP-18b is approximately 325 light years away from Earth and its mass is approximately 10 times greater than that of Jupiter.  Around it is a smothering atmosphere of carbon monoxide, and the planet is almost entirely devoid of any traces of water and has extremely high temperatures. Obviously, all of this makes life incredibly unimaginable on this planet. What is particularly interesting about this planet is that having an upper atmosphere filled with carbon monoxide is pretty unheard of in the universe so far. Kyle Sheppard of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who is also lead author of the paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters said the following about the discovery: “the composition of WASP-18b defies all expectations. We don't know of any other extrasolar plane...

At times, scientists observe flashes of radio bursts with astounding levels of energy, which are called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB’S). Such a flash was observed in 2001, a brilliant burst of light breaching the skies was observed. This event was so powerful that in the matter of seconds, power was released that was equivalent to that of 500 million suns. Just as fast as it had come, the signal disappeared in the matter of milliseconds.  Ever since such an occurrence in 2001, approximately 30 of such flashes have been identified. However, new estimates indicate that these flashes occur almost every second. Dr.Avi Loeb, science professor of Harvard University, says that “in the time it takes you to drink a cup of coffee, hundreds of FRB’s may have gone off somewhere in the universe.”  The origins these flashes remain unknown but an explanation may have been found. The FRB 121102 is the only one of such flashes that repeats. In fact, scientists have observed at least 150 flashes fro...

A hypothesis dating back almost a century has just been confirmed for the first time-- scientists have finally witnessed lightning trigger nuclear reactions within our atmosphere. Such a hypothesis predicted that high-energy electrons found within lightning are capable of producing gamma rays that would induce nuclear reactions within the thundercloud.  Image: Dmitry Kalinin/Flickr The one downside to such a phenomenon is that it hasn’t ever been definitively observed until now.  Teruaki Enoto of Kyoto University, Japan, who is an astrophysicist, and one of the researchers in this study explained the following to ScienceAlert : “the photonuclear reaction in the atmosphere has been theoretically explained [to be] triggered by such high energy radiation. Several groups have accumulated signatures of this phenomena, such as signals of either neutrons or positrons, which are products of this reaction.” Scientists have been detecting these signals dating all the way back to the 19...

The prospect of an imminent doom hovers over us, scientists warn. A series of 20 deadly earthquakes is emanating next year due to the slowing of earth’s rotation . Scientists from the University of Colorado in Boulder and the University of Montana say that even fluctuations of a millisecond could increase seismic activity, although their research has been spurned by some scientists. “The correlation between Earth's rotation and earthquake activity is strong and suggests there is going to be an increase in numbers of intense earthquakes next year.” Dr. Roger Bilham, from the University of Colorado, asserted at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. Swarms of devastating earthquakes are set to arrive next year due to the slowing of the Earth's rotation, scientists claim. The tidal pull between Earth and moon is apparently the focal reason behind planet’s slow rotation. Little changes in the speed of earth’s rotation could trigger a drastic seismic activity, mai...

Using the light-warping effects of gravity, astronomers have detected a massive object right in the center of our galaxy. The universe is teeming with cranky objects that simply don’t fall into certain categories, just like Pluto. Astronomers are dubious of what exactly this massive object is, named OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb , a huge star or a flunked star.  OGLE, 13 times the size of Jupiter orbiting a star about 22,000 light years away from Earth, is not as big as the record-breaking giant DENIS-P J082303.1-491201 b, which is 29 times the mass of Jupiter. NASA’s Spitzer has been set into Earth’s orbit around Sun since 2003 to find exoplanets, using Microlensing, which no one contemplated when it was first launched. Microlensing is comparatively an efficient technique for identifying details about stars, planets, and even galaxies. Gravity is the warping of space, which means a massive object can warp space into what is effectively a lens. The more conventional approach is to watch fo...

The existential notion of Earth-sized inhabitable exoplanets seems to be confronting our conventional understanding of the vast cosmos. However, the observations made by the Kepler spacecraft infer that one out of every five sun-like stars house an Earth-like planet within its “habitable zone” — area of space appropriately distanced from its host star likely to be comprising liquid water.  Observations made by Kepler, from its first mission, elucidates this possibility with the cutting-edge discovery of 20 potentially-habitable planets . The study is yet to be attested with further research and information, nevertheless it already seems to be quite promising. Of these 20 exoplanets, many orbit stars like the Sun. Among them, there’s a planet having the longest orbit and an extensive 395 Earth-day year, while the shortest orbits its star in 18 Earth-days. Other inhabitable planets orbiting smaller stars are found to have much shorter “years” than what was found within this Kepler d...

Astronomers have discovered a prodigious gas giant, named NGTS-1b, almost the size of Jupiter; gyrating a white dwarf half the mass and size of Sun, 600 light years from Earth. It is relatively the largest planet, compared to its star, ever found. This  discovery is big because it reveals more secrets and questions our current understanding of how planets formed. (University of Warwick/Mark Garlick) The discovery of NGTS-1b is a smash hit, confronting our current theories about planetary formation. Current theories about planetary formation don't allow for planets this size to be hanging around stars this small.  Planetary formation usually happens more slowly around small stars, and there's generally less material for such planets to form, so the gas giant in this case is certainly bewildering to what’s previously known. The chief researcher of the University of Warwick, Daniel Bayliss avows it as : "The discovery of NGTS-1b was a complete surprise to us - such massive p...

Just last year , researchers observed 2016 HO3, a satellite of our planet. And now new and more comprehensive observations, displayed at the Annual Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting, have now verified that the object is certainly a piece of rock with unknown origin but certainly not a bit of space junk. The orbit of 2016 HO3, around the Earth and the Sun. NASA/JPL-Caltech The path of 2016 HO3 is strange, to say the least. It circles the Sun, and also orbits our Earth, moving between 38 and 100 times the distance between our planet and the Moon. So it’s quiet close enough to make its origin complex but a bit too far to be studied in detail. To understand 2016 HO3, Assistant Professor Vishnu Reddy and his team from the University of Arizona decided to perform some ad hoc observations during a close approach. The team wasn’t able to constrain its size – which is definitely no larger than 100 meters (330 feet) – but could tell that it rotates on its axis twice in an hour and reflects...

Almost 1 billion years from this moment, the sun will enter in its dying phase and blow off its outer atmosphere, eating our minute planet in hot plasma. Fortunately, our galaxy will be left with NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft to remember us as a sign of existence of humans. The two nuclear-powered spacecraft started their mission 40 years ago and became the first and only machines to take close-up photos of Uranus and Neptune, the planets' moons and rings, and some other objects in the outer solar system. The Voyagers are also carrying a golden record of sounds, images, and other info about existence of life on Earth — a simple human collection that aliens might one day discover and decode. The mission is now comprehensive in an extraordinary PBS documentary called " The Farthest ", which premiered on August 23 and re-aired on September 13 at 10 p.m. ET. Brad Smith, a Voyager imaging scientist, said in the movie "Fifty years from now, Voyager will be the science...

There is a massive black hole with millions of times more mass than our sun is plunging towards Earth and will one day annihilate life as we know it.  This particular black hole is coming towards us at 110 kilometres per second and is at the center of the Great Andromeda Galaxy – the Milky Way’s closest and much larger neighbor. At the center of the most known galaxies, there exist a supermassive black hole which stars spin around and helps keep everything in formation. But such is the powerful gravitational pull of the Milky Way and Andromeda that they are being drawn toward each other and will one day crash.  Fraser Cain, publisher of space website Universe Today, wrote for Phys.org :  “There’s a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.  And not just any black hole, it’s a supermassive black hole with more than 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun.  It’s right over there, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. Located just 26,000 light-years aw...

Astronomers at the University of Auckland claim that there are actually around 100 billion habitable, Earth-like planets in the Milky Way — significantly more than the previous estimate of around 17 billion.  There are roughly 500 billion galaxies in the universe, meaning there is somewhere in the region of 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. I’ll leave you to do the math on whether one of those 50 sextillion planets has the right conditions for nurturing alien life or not. The previous figure of 17 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way came from the  Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in January, which analyzed data from the Kepler space observatory. Kepler essentially measures the dimming (apparent magnitude) of stars as planets transit in front of them — the more a star dims, the larger the planet. Through repeated observations we can work out the planet’s orbital period, from which we can usually derive the orbital distance and surface...