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 Ever since the first exoplanets were discovered over a generation ago, it has been clear to planet-hunting astronomers that many other planetary systems circling distant stars do not resemble our own. Indeed, a treasure trove of planetary oddballs have demonstrated that there are myriad brave new worlds that travel to the beat of a different drummer than the familiar planets of our Sun's own family. Such an oddball world is HR 5183 b, whose very unusual orbit resembles a slingshot. The loopy world is three times the mass of our Solar System's banded behemoth , Jupiter, and it travels on a long, egg-shaped path around its parent star, HR 5183. While other exoplanets with highly elliptical orbits have been discovered circling distant stars, none of those strange worlds were located at the outer limits of their star systems like this one. If this planet were somehow placed into our own familiar Solar System, it would take a breathtaking swing around our Sun, that would take it f...

 According to Big Bang cosmology, the cosmic Dark Ages occurred early in the history of the Universe, that is thought to have been born approximately 13.8 billion years ago in the wild and explosive exponential inflation of Spacetime. During this very ancient era, the newborn Universe gradually cooled down from its original extremely hot and dense state, and this cooling-off period allowed electrons and protons to meet up and dance together to create hydrogen atoms. This heralded the beginning of the Dark Ages, an era enshrouded in impenetrable blackness and alluring mystery. Reionization refers to the process that caused the matter in the Universe to reionize after the Dark Ages had finally ended, when the first luminous objects formed during the Cosmic Dawn. In August 2019, an international team of cosmologists announced that they had been able to demonstrate that primordial galaxies triggered the era of reionization. The cosmologists arrived at their conclusion by studying green...

 Banded, big, and beautiful, enormous Jupiter reigns supreme as the King of Planets in our Sun's enchanting family. This distant world, famous for its crimson hurricane-like storms and many moons, sports the hefty mass of 2.5 times that of all the other major planets in our Solar System combined. Indeed, Jupiter is so massive that its barycenter with our Sun is situated above the Sun's surface at 1.068 solar radii from the Sun's center. But, beneath its extremely heavy blanket of gas, Jupiter hides a tragic secret. At its very core, Jupiter has a broken heart. In August 2019, a team of astronomers announced that they may have determined how Jupiter's heart was broken. This majestic world may still be reeling from a colossal head-on collision, that it suffered in its youth, with a still-forming protoplanet. The sad event occurred in the early days of our Solar System, about 4.5 billion years ago. This new theory could explain mysterious readings obtained from NASA's...