Ask Astro - Astronomy Magazine

Ask Astro answers reader questions about the science and hobby of astronomy in every issue of the magazine. Search our archive of questions or submit your own question for consideration in the magazine.

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If a brown dwarf orbited the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter, would life have evolved on Earth?

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PREVIOUS QUESTIONS

How can astronomers tell the difference between a group or cluster of stars and an actual galaxy?	I’ve read about background radiation fields that fill the universe. Is the infrared radiation as ancient as the microwave, and are there other cosmic fields of radiation besides these two?	Could the huge gamma-ray bubbles that extend above and below the center of the Milky Way be a boundary of matter and antimatter, whose collision emits gamma rays?	What would cause Earth’s orbit to become more circular instead of its present elliptical orbit, and has this ever happened before?
Is the incredibly slow rotation of Venus a result of a geologic cataclysm?	What is the Higgs particle?	If the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies collide head-on when the two are predicted to merge five billion years from now, what is likely to happen to the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds?	What are typical star-to-star distances in globular clusters compared to stellar distances in our region of the galaxy?

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