Evan Gough

The thinking around exoplanet habitability is mostly concerned with a planet's distance from its star. Too close, and any surface water is boiled away into space.

Planetary nebulae like the Crystal Ball Nebula (NGC 1514) are sort of like stellar obituaries.

Mars holds a special place in the Solar System. It represents marginal habitability. This means it transitioned from warm and wet and potentially hospitable, to cold and dry and inhospitable.

The thinking around exoplanet habitability is mostly concerned with a planet's distance from its star. Too close, and any surface water is boiled away into space. Too far, and surface water is frozen. Both are severe limits on the prospects for life. Habitability depends on an exoplanet being in the Goldilocks Zone, a distance range around a star where liquid water can persist.

Humanity is in a precarious position. Cosmic forces beyond our power to alter buffet us about like playthings.

Astrophysicists think that black hole masses are heirarchical. The largest are supermassive black holes (SMBH) like the one at the center of the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Open star clusters are some of the most dazzling objects in the sky. The small ones contain a few dozen stars, while the largest contain several thousand.

The N159 star-forming complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud is a stunning example of an active star formation region.

Stars form inside giant molecular clouds (GMCs), vast collections of mostly atomic hydrogen. This happens in the densest, coldest regions of the clouds, where gas more easily accumulates.

Ever since the JWST revealed a population of SMBH in the early Universe that were overmassive, scientists have been working hard to explain them.