Civilization Can’t Arise Without Plate Tectonics And Carbon Dioxide

While plate tectonics may not be absolutely necessary for life, they may be necessary for a technological civilization to arise. Habitability may be possible on a static world, but habitability probably won’t persist long enough for a technological civilization like ours to appear. Plate tectonics regulates our planet’s climate, and without it, atmospheric CO2 would … Read more

Interstellar Objects Like Comet 3I/ATLAS Could Act As Planetary Seeds

The Gemini South Telescope captured this image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it sped through the inner Solar System. The comet’s coma and tail are growing as it approaches the Sun. Image Credit: By International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=174444353 Comet 3I/ATLAS’s appearance in the inner Solar System in July 2025 … Read more

Astronomers Catch a Planet in the Act of Being Born

Protoplanets are celestial objects in the act of forming into full planets within the gas and dust disks surrounding hot, young stars. These objects, often several times the mass of Jupiter, are still embedded in their birth environments, actively feeding on surrounding material through their own circumplanetary disks. Unlike mature planets, protoplanets offer a rare … Read more

Clusters and Chains of Stars Reveal a Dynamic Milky Way

Three data releases from the recently retired Gaia spacecraft show that far-flung parts of the Milky Way are connected by families of stars born in clusters. Some continue to travel the galaxy together, while others appear wildly dispersed, sometimes as chains of related stars. One cluster is even trying to escape the Milky Way. The … Read more

Does the Multiverse Explain the Nature of the Universe?

One possibility to explain the constants of nature is that there’s more than one universe. That we live in a multiverse, with each different universe “sampling” different values of the constants. There are a few extremely hypothetical ideas in physics that can lead to the multiverse. One is through the concept of eternal inflation, where … Read more

Earth Has Another Quasi-Satellite: The Asteroid Arjuna 2025 PN7

Whenever astronomers detect something new moving through our region of space, like an interstellar object or an unusual asteroid, somebody somewhere claims it could be an alien interstellar space probe. It’s like one of those laws about human behaviour—Godwin’s Law for example—that should probably have its own name. This applies to the detection of 1991 … Read more