Humanity may not be extraordinary but rather the natural evolutionary outcome for our planet and likely others, according to a new model for how intelligent life developed on Earth. The model, which ...

How do terrestrial planets like Earth form and evolve to enable life to exist? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a pair of scientists from the Southwest Research ...

Image: A Hubble Space Telescope image of circumstellar disc surrounding a young star. Just as anthropologists sought “the missing link” between apes and humans, astronomers are embarking on a quest ...

The black star represents the position of the star. The colored lines are the orbits of two planets. The yellow one is the outer, and it is highly inclined. The inner one is the red one. As time ...

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch ...

A peculiar planet unraveled by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has left astronomers scratching their heads. Despite being bombarded with intense radiation from its red giant parent ...

Planets are bodies that orbit a star and have sufficient gravitational mass that they form themselves into roughly spherical shapes that, in turn, exert gravitational force on smaller objects around ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

A new model upends the decades-old “hard steps” theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event and suggests that maybe it wasn't all that hard or improbable. The team of researchers ...