Obliterating

This time last year, Low were due to headline Le Guess Who, an experimental music festival in Utrecht. Instead, the beloved US indie band had to cancel their tour dates owing to the declining health of singer and drummer Mimi Parker, who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years prior. On 5 November 2022, she died at home in Duluth, Minnesota, aged 55. Her loss essentially brought to an end the haunting, hymnal group that she and husband Alan Sparhawk formed in 1993, having first met in primary school, and which…

The moon crashing into Earth may sound like an unrealistic doomsday scenario or the stuff of sci-fi disasters. But for some planets in other star systems, such catastrophic collisions may be common. New research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyuses computer simulations to show that collisions between exoplanets and their moons (called exomoons) may actually be a regular occurrence, which could be disastrous for any budding alien life on those planets. While astronomers have yet…