Visiting America’s national parks is a treasured public pastime. The wetlands of Congaree in South Carolina, the depths of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the vistas provided by peaks in Yosemite in California are iconic American experiences for residents and for people who travel from other countries to vacation.

There are lots of benefits of visiting national parks, or parks in general. Spending time in nature is good for people’s mental health. Moving in the outdoors – walking, biking, running, paddling – benefits people’s physical health. Sharing experiences with others helps build social connections with old friends or newfound ones. Visitors also learn about ecosystems and cultural history, developing their own relationship to the landscape.

National park visitation is growing, with record-high visitor numbers in 2024 across the entire 398-property system, as well as at the 63 formally designated national parks. And there has been a general trend of people gravitating to Instagram-popular parks, and even specific spots within popular parks.

Reductions in federal funding and staffing at national parks means visitors may see longer lines to enter parks or popular locations within them, fewer visitor services and educational programs, and fewer rangers to ask for advice or assistance.

As scholars of parks and recreation, we know crowded conditions make it harder to enjoy national parks. But we also know that if you plan carefully, you can create a great experience.

What gets in the way of fun?

In general, research identifies three main barriers to recreational fun.

One is how confident people are in their own physical abilities and how safe they feel in the park. For example, someone may want to go kayaking in Florida’s Everglades or Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park but doesn’t know where to rent a boat, where to put it in the water, or which stretches of water are best for a beginner.

Another is the presence – or absence – of people to enjoy the space with, or family obligations or relationships that might preclude them from an activity. Culture can also play a role in where people visit and what they do there. For instance, a national park may be a source of escape where individuals seek autonomy and independence. For others, a national park visit can be a focal point for social gatherings and a time to reconnect with family and friends.

There are also external factors, like how much free time a person has for recreation and how easy it is to get to a national park from their home. Someone may live a short drive from a national park but not visit simply because they do not know what they can do there, or how to have a positive experience.

More recently, research has also identified environmental barriers outside visitors’ control. Thin ice or lack of snow prevents many winter activities in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park and Maine’s Acadia National Park, just as excessive heat can decrease the attractiveness of summer recreation in parks like the Everglades or California’s Death Valley. Extreme weather events such as inland flooding and coastal hurricanes can block roads and damage parks, posing both physical and logistical barriers in parks such as Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina.

Wildlife habits also affect visitors, who may flock to an area where they can see wildlife. Or they may avoid – or may be restricted from – areas with dangerous wildlife.

Adapting to find enjoyment anyway

If the national park places you want to visit seem too busy, think about your options. You could change your travel dates to a less busy time. People who want to visit Yellowstone in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana could find campground reservations unavailable for some weeks but plentiful for other weeks – or they could choose to stay in a local hotel instead of camping.

You could try a different park or activity. For example, an angler who typically visits Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee to fish for trout may find that some streams are warming and no longer support this activity. They might go fishing elsewhere or stay in the Smokies and bird-watch, hike or read by a stream.

If you really want to visit during a busy time, you can also simply change your expectations, like not expecting Old Faithful to be a quiet place with only a few visitors.

Park personnel often seek to manage visitor numbers to protect the park from too much traffic, but also so everyone who visits can enjoy the experience. For example, implementing reservations for Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain at sunrise means at least some people get a relatively serene experience, as opposed to lots of people having an overcrowded experience.

Park staff also design park amenities so roads, boat ramps, trailheads and parking are in useful locations that work well for the number of visitors expected. And park workers provide advance information for visitors, in brochures and on websites, charge fees for entry, conduct tours or other programs at the location – and ticket or arrest people who are in places or doing activities they’re not supposed to – to reduce the effects of overcrowding.

Planning is key

We have found that the most effective way for people to have the park experiences they want, and enjoy them as much as they hope, is to plan ahead.

Planning can include looking at parks’ websites for ideas and considering the best time to visit – both for your own schedule and what you want to do.

Understanding the weather and climate of the region will help you determine what to bring, but also what conditions will be like if you’re hiking, paddling or driving.

Advance preparation definitely includes finding lodging – and making reservations whenever possible. If reservations aren’t possible, see whether you can increase your chances of finding a place to sleep when you arrive by choosing lesser-visited parts of the park or identifying nearby backup options, such as state parks and private campgrounds, that might provide a break from the crowds.

And you can make sure you’re prepared for whatever you’re going to do, whether it’s getting used to walking long distances before a big hike or learning about local flora and fauna before you arrive.

Thinking ahead also means you can share your itinerary with friends and family – either as invitations to join you or for periodic safety check-ins.

It is also helpful to talk to park personnel. Park staff will have great insights into hidden gems that might be slightly off the beaten path but away from the crowds and able to provide a unique visitor experience. Rangers or other staff can help you determine the best choices for settings and activities that match your abilities, interests, time and needs.

And finally, don’t forget to be considerate of other visitors. Have patience in the parking lots, visitor centers, trailheads and lookout points. Others in the park seek the same awe-inspiring views and heart-pumping recreation activities as you. In many cases, it’s not the number of people but the attitudes and behaviors of those people that can make a place either feel crowded or like a community of like-minded outdoor enthusiasts.

Allie McCreary, Assistant Professor of Parks and Recreation, Auburn University and Michael Brunson, Professor of Practice, Parks and Recreation Management, Auburn University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Sun will someday die. This will happen when it runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core and can no longer produce energy through nuclear fusion as it does now. The death of the Sun is often thought of as the end of the solar system. But in reality, it may be the beginning of a new phase of life for all the objects living in the solar system.

When stars like the Sun die, they go through a phase of rapid expansion called the Red Giant phase: The radius of the star gets bigger, and its color gets redder. Once the gravity on the star’s surface is no longer strong enough for it to hold on to its outer layers, a large fraction – up to about half – of its mass escapes into space, leaving behind a remnant called a white dwarf.

I am a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2020, my colleagues and I discovered the first intact planet orbiting around a white dwarf. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the prospect of life on planets around these, tiny, dense white dwarfs.

Researchers search for signs of life in the universe by waiting until a planet passes between a star and their telescope’s line of sight. With light from the star illuminating the planet from behind, they can use some simple physics principles to determine the types of molecules present in the planet’s atmosphere.

In 2020, researchers realized they could use this technique for planets orbiting white dwarfs. If such a planet had molecules created by living organisms in its atmosphere, the James Webb Space Telescope would probably be able to spot them when the planet passed in front of its star.

In June 2025, I published a paper answering a question that first started bothering me in 2021: Could an ocean – likely needed to sustain life – even survive on a planet orbiting close to a dead star?

A universe full of white dwarfs

A white dwarf has about half the mass of the Sun, but that mass is compressed into a volume roughly the size of Earth, with its electrons pressed as close together as the laws of physics will allow. The Sun has a radius 109 times the size of Earth’s – this size difference means that an Earth-like planet orbiting a white dwarf could be about the same size as the star itself.

White dwarfs are extremely common: An estimated 10 billion of them exist in our galaxy. And since every low-mass star is destined to eventually become a white dwarf, countless more have yet to form. If it turns out that life can exist on planets orbiting white dwarfs, these stellar remnants could become promising and plentiful targets in the search for life beyond Earth.

But can life even exist on a planet orbiting a white dwarf? Astronomers have known since 2011 that the habitable zone is extremely close to the white dwarf. This zone is the location in a planetary system where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. It can’t be too close to the star that the water would boil, nor so far away that it would freeze.

The habitable zone around a white dwarf would be 10 to 100 times closer to the white dwarf than our own habitable zone is to our Sun, since white dwarfs are so much fainter.

The challenge of tidal heating

Being so close to the surface of the white dwarf would bring new challenges to emerging life that more distant planets, like Earth, do not face. One of these is tidal heating.

Tidal forces – the differences in gravitational forces that objects in space exert on different parts of a nearby second object – deform a planet, and the friction causes the material being deformed to heat up. An example of this can be seen on Jupiter’s moon Io.

The forces of gravity exerted by Jupiter’s other moons tug on Io’s orbit, deforming its interior and heating it up, resulting in hundreds of volcanoes erupting constantly across its surface. As a result, no surface water can exist on Io because its surface is too hot.

In contrast, the adjacent moon Europa is also subject to tidal heating, but to a lesser degree, since it’s farther from Jupiter. The heat generated from tidal forces has caused Europa’s ice shell to partially melt, resulting in a subsurface ocean.

Planets in the habitable zone of a white dwarf would have orbits close enough to the star to experience tidal heating, similar to how Io and Europa are heated from their proximity to Jupiter.

This proximity itself can pose a challenge to habitability. If a system has more than one planet, tidal forces from nearby planets could cause the planet’s atmosphere to trap heat until it becomes hotter and hotter, making the planet too hot to have liquid water.

Enduring the red giant phase

Even if there is only one planet in the system, it may not retain its water.

In the process of becoming a white dwarf, a star will expand to 10 to 100 times its original radius during the red giant phase. During that time, anything within that expanded radius will be engulfed and destroyed. In our own solar system, Mercury, Venus and Earth will be destroyed when the Sun eventually becomes a red giant before transitioning into a white dwarf.

For a planet to survive this process, it would have to start out much farther from the star — perhaps at the distance of Jupiter or even beyond.

If a planet starts out that far away, it would need to migrate inward after the white dwarf has formed in order to become habitable. Computer simulations show that this kind of migration is possible, but the process could cause extreme tidal heating that may boil off surface water – similar to how tidal heating causes Io’s volcanism. If the migration generates enough heat, then the planet could lose all its surface water by the time it finally reaches a habitable orbit.

However, if the migration occurs late enough in the white dwarf’s lifetime – after it has cooled and is no longer a hot, bright, newly formed white dwarf – then surface water may not evaporate away.

Under the right conditions, planets orbiting white dwarfs could sustain liquid water and potentially support life.

Search for life on planets orbiting white dwarfs

Astronomers haven’t yet found any Earth-like, habitable exoplanets around white dwarfs. But these planets are difficult to detect.

Traditional detection methods like the transit technique are less effective because white dwarfs are much smaller than typical planet-hosting stars. In the transit technique, astronomers watch for the dips in light that occur when a planet passes in front of its host star from our line of sight. Because white dwarfs are so small, you would have to be very lucky to see a planet passing in front of one.

Nevertheless, researchers are exploring new strategies to detect and characterize these elusive worlds using advanced telescopes such as the Webb telescope.

If habitable planets are found to exist around white dwarfs, it would significantly broaden the range of environments where life might persist, demonstrating that planetary systems may remain viable hosts for life even long after the death of their host star.

Juliette Becker, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.