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Astronomers scan for disappearing stars
Scientists are adept at spotting stars, even very old ones. But what about stars that disappear? A handful of researchers, led by Uppsala University's Beatriz Villarroel, aims to find out. They've been comparing sky surveys to see if any light sources (usually stars) have disappeared between these scans. Out of the 300,000 sources in the study, they've found one that appears to have vanished without a trace.
Exoplanet census suggests Earth really is special
There are an estimated 700 million trillion terrestrial planets in the observable universe. Among them, Earth may very well be one of a kind according to a new study from Uppsala University in Sweden. Astronomer Erik Zackrisson and his team have been running computer simulations to model all of the terrestrial planets that are likely to exist in the universe. The probabilistic exoplanetary statistics that they've gleaned from these simulations could potentially upend the Copernican principle and will soon be published in The Astrophysical Journal (it's currently up on arXiv).
