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A new Way to Hunt for Planet 9?

planet 9 - pixabay

There’s something heavy in the outer reaches of our solar system. At least, it seems that way. Hints of it are scattered across the farthest reaches of our sun’s neighborhood — that something 5 to 10 times the mass of Earth tugging on nearby objects with its gravity. No one’s ever seen it, as this phantom has eluded years of searches by telescopes. In fact, not everyone believes it’s real. For now, most astronomers refer to it as “Planet 9.” Now, the famous theoretical physicist Edward Witten has published a paper on how to track down this specter haunting our … Read more

SPACE: Should We Be Looking at White Dwarfs For Alien Life?

Humans have been searching for signs of extraterrestrial (ET) life for decades. We’ve been listening carefully for strange radio signals, looking for signatures of the artificial altering of stars and digging up rocks on Mars. But alas, so far, we’ve found nothing. As far as we can tell, we’re alone. But it could be that we’re looking in the wrong places. We know that life can appear around stars like our sun, and we know that stars like our sun will turn into white dwarfs (small, dense stars that are stellar core remnants approximately the size of planets) at the … Read more