Department Events

The rings around Uranus have mystified astronomers for almost half a century. Now, thanks to a combination of ground- and space-based telescopic observations, scientists think they’ve worked out where two of these rings came from.

A blue-tinged ring, named Mu, seems to be made of icy shards knocked off a nearby moon by micrometeorite impacts, researchers report in the April Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Conversely, Nu, a reddish ring, is composed of rocky particles probably sourced in a similar manner from an unseen rocky moon or moons.

Ring systems — like those...

In a Q&A, UC Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri reality-checks the recent sci-fi movie and talks about the chances of encountering life elsewhere in the galaxy.

In the sci-fi book and now movie Project Hail Mary, astronaut Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, encounters three different alien lifeforms in the vicinity of Earth. He joins forces with one of them, from the star 40 Eridani, to try to stop another, an alien microbe from Tau Ceti, that is eating stars — including our sun. The third lifeform saves the day....