Mystery of Galaxy

Are  Red dwarfs habitable? Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe. Red Dwarfs Source: ESA/Hubble / CC With their ubiquity, low temperatures, lifetimes spanning trillions of years, and a bounty of rocky planets in their habitable zones, red dwarfs may seem like the most likely place in the universe to find life. But red dwarfs are known for unleashing ultrapowerful flares that could potentially destroy a close planet's atmosphere. However, the two closest red dwarfs to our solar system - Proxima Centauri and Barnard's star - each host potentially habitable planets. Proxima Centauri  Source: ESA/Hubble / CC BY  As our technology improves, these systems will become the first natural laboratories to see if living with a red dwarf star is possible. Welcome back to my blog " Mystery of Galaxy ". In a previous article,  we talked about the lifespans of red dwarf stars. The link is given at the end of this article....

 Red Dwarfs Stars come in a wide range of masses and sizes. Some are stellar behemoths up to 300 times the mass of our Sun. Others are similar in mass to our Sun and represent our stellar cousins. But the lowest mass stars are the red dwarfs . They're small, dim, and slow-burning. Their lifespans are so long that they will be the last stars ever to shine in our universe, and will be the place where life will make its final stand. Red Dwarfs Source: ESA/Hubble / CC Welcome back to my blog " Mystery of Galaxy " and in this article we're going to learn about the smallest, dimmest stars in the universe, the red dwarfs.  As their name implies, red dwarfs are smaller and cooler than our Sun, shining brightest at infrared wavelengths. They're also much less massive, about 40% the mass of our Sun all the way down to 8%. In fact, the smallest and least massive red dwarfs are barely stars at all; they're just massive enough to sustain hydrogen fusion in the...

Death of our sun: a beautiful journey will come to an end Welcome to my blog "Mystery of Galaxy". Today our topic is "how the beautiful journey of our sun will come to an end?" The exception of course is our Sun, but if anything it's a typical star. It does what stars do by fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, creating energy in the process. There's enough hydrogen fuel to keep the Sun burning for about 10 to 11 billion years. But our Sun is already four-and-a-half billion years old. Source: NASA/SDO (AIA) / Public domain What happens when that hydrogen is exhausted in five and a half billion years? Let's find out and see how low mass stars like our Sun will evolve and eventually die.  we know that stars exist in a delicate balance between the energy radiating from its core which exerts a pressure against the surrounding layers. Meanwhile the surrounding layers attempt to crush the star inward, exerting pressure on the core which sus...

Welcome to my blog "Mystery of Galaxy". Today our topic is "origin of our Moon". Our Moon is weird. At 1% of Earth's mass is the largest satellite relative to its planet. It orbits at a large distance from the Earth and its orbit is tilted from both the Earth's equator and from the plane of Earth's orbit around the Sun. Samples returned from the Apollo missions show that despite its appearance the Moon is chemically and identical twin of Earth. These findings sparked a new debate over how the Moon was formed. Planetary scientists quickly converged on the idea that the Moon formed from a collision between the still forming proto-Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet. This is the Giant Impact hypothesis and it's been the favored explanation for the Moon's formation for the last 50 years.  Giant Impact hypothesis Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC) / Public domain But the Giant Impact doesn't really hold up too well under close...