Latest Articles
Super-Earths in the Habitable Zone: Why Kepler-22b Is the Benchmark for a New Class of Worlds
The first Earth-like world we found wasn’t Earth-like at all. It was called a super-Earth, though that classification would later prove contested, and it might not even be solid. Kepler-22b, discovered in 2011, was the first confirmed planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. It has a radius 2.4 times that of Earth,…
Kepler-22b Habitability: Why the Unknown Mass Is the Central Question
Of the thousands of exoplanets confirmed since the first detection in 1992, only a handful sit in the right place, around the right star, at the right distance to make the question worth asking seriously: could this world support life? Kepler-22b habitability is the question this article addresses: what do we actually know, and what…
Kepler-22b vs Earth: A Side-by-Side Comparison of Two Worlds in the Habitable Zone
The Kepler-22b vs Earth comparison starts with a striking coincidence: both planets receive nearly identical amounts of starlight. Kepler-22b gets almost the same amount of starlight as Earth. It has a similar year and orbits a near-twin of our Sun. So why aren’t scientists calling it Earth 2.0? A Kepler-22b vs Earth comparison starts with…
The Big Crunch: What Happens If Gravity Wins the Universe
Imagine the history of the universe (the birth of galaxies, stars, planets, life) played in reverse, faster and faster, until everything merges into a single, searing point. This is the Big Crunch. The universe is currently expanding. Every galaxy beyond our Local Group is moving away from every other, carried apart by the growth of…
Dark Energy and the Cosmic Event Horizon: The Boundary Already Cutting Us Off
There is a number that cosmologists rarely lead with, because it is quietly devastating. It is 16 billion light-years. Beyond that distance, every galaxy (every trillion stars, every possible civilization, every structure in the universe) has already sent us its last message. We simply have not received it yet. That number is the dark energy…
The Big Rip: If Dark Energy Keeps Strengthening, How the Universe Would End
The universe has survived for 13.8 billion years. It has weathered the Big Bang, the formation of the first stars, the death of trillions of suns, and the slow gravitational assembly of a cosmic web spanning hundreds of millions of light-years. It is, by any reasonable measure, robust. The Big Rip is the scenario in…
