The most feasible explanation is that icy ring particles raining down onto Saturn’s atmosphere cause this heating, according to a team of astronomers who analyzed several...
There are many thousands of volcanoes on the surface of Venus. These volcanoes provide clues into the interior properties of the planet, properties that are otherwise...
Scientists from China and the United States have analyzed the impact glass beads from a lunar soil sample returned by China’s Chang’e-5 mission. Asteroid and comet...
THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — A young, ultrabright Jupiter may have desiccated its now hellish moon Io. The planet’s bygone brilliance could have also vaporized water on...
A rocky planet that circles a small star nearly 40 light-years from Earth is hot and has little or no atmosphere, a new study suggests. The...
A neutron star pileup may have emitted two different kinds of cosmic signals: ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves and a brief blip of energy...
The radar properties of icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn commonly differ by more than an order of magnitude from those of rocky planets because of...
Black holes exist in our universe. That’s widely accepted today. Physicists have detected the X-rays emitted when black holes feed, analyzed the gravitational waves from black...
An international team of researchers has detected nicotinic acid (also known as vitamin B3 or niacin) and uracil, one of the four nucleobases in ribonucleic acid,...
Off-EarthErika NesvoldMIT Press, $27.95 Astrophysicist Erika Nesvold once asked an executive of a company aiming to mine the moon how he planned to address risks that...
Uracil, a building block of life, has been found on the asteroid Ryugu. Yasuhiro Oba and colleagues discovered the precursor to life in samples collected from...
A so-called light-toned deposit (LTD) in Eastern Noctis Labyrinthus, about 160 km (99.4 miles) north-west of Oudemans crater near Mars’ equator, presents distinctive morphologic characteristics of...
17th century scientist Christiaan Huygens set his sights on faraway Saturn, but he may have been nearsighted. Huygens is known, in part, for discovering Saturn’s largest...
The StarCrete is twice as strong as regular concrete and is made from extraterrestrial dust, potato starch, and a pinch of salt. Aled Roberts and Nigel...
THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — Martian dirt may have all the necessary nutrients for growing rice, one of humankind’s most important foods, planetary scientist Abhilash Ramachandran reported...
In new research, planetary scientists from the University of Maryland and elsewhere analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the Solar System’s...
Planetary scientists have examined volcanic areas on Venus that were imaged two or three times by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft and identified a 2.2-km2 volcanic vent that...
Venus has active volcanism. A new analysis of decades-old images reveals the first definitive sign of a volcano erupting on the hellish planet next door. NASA’s...
THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — Vestiges of a moon-forming cataclysm could have kick-started plate tectonics on Earth. The leading explanation for the origin of the moon proposes...
The subsurface ocean of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is heated from below via tidal heating and radioactive decay of the rocky interior, while being cooled from...
A streak of light stretching away from a remote galaxy might be the first sure sign of a gargantuan black hole on the run, a new...
A gaggle of galaxies crackle with intricate detail in new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. JWST’s sharp infrared eyes are revealing how newborn stars...
‘Sun rays’ are also known as crepuscular rays, from the Latin word for twilight. It was the first time sun rays have been so clearly viewed...
For the first time, astronomers have caught a glimpse of shock waves rippling along strands of the cosmic web — the enormous tangle of galaxies, gas...
The space salad contains ingredients — including soybean, poppy, barley, kale, peanuts, sweet potato and sunflower seeds — that could be grown on spacecraft and provide...
SpaceX’s rapidly growing fleet of Starlink internet satellites now make up half of all active satellites in Earth orbit. On February 27, the aerospace company launched...
On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) intentionally slammed into the 160-m-wide asteroid moonlet Dimorphos — which orbits the larger, 780-m-wide asteroid Didymos...
Earth has a hot core that heats the surrounding mantle, which carries that heat up to the planet’s lithosphere. The heat is then lost to space,...
The chances of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations seem poor – Science News, February 24, 1973 The possibility of life … on other planets has stimulated many people’s...
The Milky Way is churning out far more stars than previously thought, according to a new estimate of its star formation rate. Gamma rays from aluminum-26,...
The James Webb Space Telescope’s first peek at the distant universe unveiled galaxies that appear too big to exist. Six galaxies that formed in the universe’s...
University of Washington researcher Baptiste Journaux and colleagues believe the newly-created substances could form at the surface and bottom of deep oceans on Jupiter’s icy moons...
Frictional electrification is a common process in the Solar System, with Martian dust activities known to be a powerful source of electrical charge buildup. Furthermore, the...
In August 2021 on a lonely crater floor, the newest Mars rover dug into one of its first rocks. The percussive drill attached to the arm...
The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest known galaxy to abruptly stop forming stars. The galaxy, called GS-9209, quenched its star formation more than...
Saturn is known for its iconic, pristine rings. However, the main B ring can have splotches and streaks of darker or lighter material, known as spokes,...
The dwarf planet Quaoar has a ring that is too big for its metaphorical fingers. While all other rings in the solar system lie within or...
When ocean-bearing moons begin to cool down, their oceans can freeze. As new ice accretes to the bottom of the existing ice shell, the added volume...
Mimas, a small moon of Saturn, is heavily cratered and lacks the typical characteristics of an ocean-bearing moon, such as the active surface of Enceladus. However,...
If you’re a museum aficionado itching for a new place to explore, 2023 has you covered. New science museums and exhibitions are opening, and some zoos...
Astronomers recently announced the discovery of TOI-700e, a habitable-zone, Earth-sized planet some 102 light-years away in the southern constellation of Dorado. Could this new discovery lead...
SEATTLE — Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is the stuff of science fiction. But Tatooine-like planets in orbit around pairs of stars might be...
The night sky has been brightening faster than researchers realized, thanks to the use of artificial lights at night. A study of more than 50,000 observations...
A team of meteorite hunters from Belgium and the United States has found five new Antarctic meteorites, including one that weighs 7.6 kg. The 7.6-kg meteorite...
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is shrouded in a thick layer of snow. In some places, the downy stuff is 700 meters deep, new research suggests. “It’s like...
An international team of researchers has detected abundant polyaromatic compounds, organic magnesium compounds, aliphatic branched carboxylic acids, aldehydes, and olefins in the Tissint meteorite, which landed...
Galaxies that helped transform the early universe may have been small, round and green. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted “Green Pea” galaxies...
SEATTLE — Attention alien hunters: If you want to find life on distant planets, try looking for signs of toxic chemical cleanup. Gases that organisms produce...
If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole in space, you won’t be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But you may have...
Enceladus, the sixth-biggest moon of Saturn, is a top candidate in the search for extraterrestrial life in the Solar System. An artist’s impression of NASA’s Cassini...
Using data from NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA’s Juno spacecraft, two teams of astronomers have...
The El Ali meteorite, a 15.2-ton iron meteorite found in 2020 near the tiny town of El Ali in Somalia, contains at least two new minerals:...
A new image from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express orbiter shows an exciting landscape of layered deposits, frost, ice, and...
CHICAGO — An entire ocean of liquid magma, or maybe a hot heart of solid metal, may lurk in Io’s underworld. The surface of Jupiter’s innermost...
A perfect ending for the final Apollo — Science News, December 23, 1972 Project Apollo ended this week. The last moon men … returned to Earth...
New scientific records are set every year, and 2022 was no exception. A bacterial behemoth, a shockingly speedy supercomputer and a close-by black hole are among...
While the stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope captured space fans’ attention this year, other telescopes and spacecraft were busy on Earth and around...
BALTIMORE — When the James Webb Space Telescope was first dreamed up, exoplanets hadn’t even been discovered yet. Now the observatory is showing astronomers what it...
The first planet ever spotted by the Kepler space telescope is falling into its star. Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find exoplanets by...
CHICAGO — The last key ingredient for life has been discovered on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Phosphorus is a vital building block of life, used to...
BALTIMORE — The James Webb Space Telescope is living up to its promise as a wayback machine. The spectacularly sensitive observatory is finding and confirming galaxies...
Juno’s unprecedented views of Jupiter and its moons are a gift that keeps on giving. The NASA spacecraft was originally slated to end its mission in...
Dust devils — convective vortices loaded with dust — are common at the surface of Mars, particularly at Jezero crater, the landing site of NASA’s Perseverance...
Thanks to a bit of good luck, the Mars rover Perseverance has captured the first-ever sound of a Martian dust devil. The NASA rover has witnessed...
NASA’s Orion passenger space capsule has passed a huge test, splashing down intact in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico on December 11. The...
NASA’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s Baja California at 12:40 p.m. ET on December 10, 2022. The splashdown is...
Astronomers have spotted a bright gamma-ray burst that upends previous theories of how these energetic cosmic eruptions occur. For decades, astronomers thought that GRBs came in...
This year marked the end of a decades-long wait for astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in action. The telescope, which launched in December...
Elysium Planitia, a flat-smooth plain just north of the Martian equator, is underlain by an 4,000-km-diameter active mantle plume, according to new research by scientists from...
The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years. An animation from the...
The Chicxulub-like asteroid crash landed in shallow ocean waters in the Martian region of Chryse Planitia 3.4 billion years ago (Hesperian period) and left a crater...
When astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped from the moon’s surface into his spacecraft in December 1972, he was aware it was the end of an era. His...
For the first time, astronomers have observed how certain supermassive black holes launch jets of high-energy particles into space — and the process is shocking. Shock...
An analysis of chromium isotopes in Martian meteorites suggests that approximately 4.5 billion years ago, there was enough water for the entire planet to be covered...
Carrying an uncrewed Orion, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) — the most powerful rocket in the world — lifted off today at 1:47 a.m. EST from...
Late in the evening of February 28, 2021, a coal-dark space rock about the size of a soccer ball fell through the sky over northern England....
Using images obtained by two orbiting spacecraft, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express, planetary researchers analyzed textured dust storms that develop at the northern...
Fifty years ago, three NASA astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, concluding the final Apollo mission. Less than a dozen years after President John F....
The timing and locations of formation of planetesimals — the building blocks of planets — are crucial to the understanding of planet formation. If we are...
A cryptic chemical signature of unknown origins, hidden for centuries inside the trunks of Earth’s trees, just became even more mysterious. In the last decade, scientists...
Fragments of a star catalog from the second century B.C. have turned up in a manuscript that had been erased and written over centuries later. A...
The closest black hole yet found is just 1,560 light-years from Earth, a new study reports. The black hole, dubbed Gaia BH1, is about 10 times...
The sample of material delivered to our planet from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu contained a mixture of extraterrestrial (helium and neon) and terrestrial atmospheric gases, according...
Mars might be, geologically speaking, not quite dead. Researchers have analyzed a slew of recent temblors on the Red Planet and shown that these Marsquakes are...
Radiation-tolerant microbes might be able to live beneath Mars’ surface for hundreds of millions of years and may yet persist today, thanks in part — counterintuitively...
We’ve never seen images of space as astounding as those from the James Webb Space Telescope, which shared its first cosmic vistas in July. The pictures...
This new image from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard ESA’s Mars Express orbiter shows a diverse region southeast of the Pickering crater in Terra...
On December 24, 2021, NASA’s InSight lander recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake with a distinct signature rippling across the surface of Mars. In a pair of...
A major question in Mars history is whether the planet had an ocean in its northern hemisphere. New research provides evidence for a northern ocean or...
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded recently lit up a distant galaxy — and astronomers have nicknamed it the BOAT, for Brightest of All Time. “We...
The annual ozone hole over the South Pole reached an average area of 23.2 million km2 (8.9 million square miles) between September 7 and October 13,...
Radiation resistance of microbes is a key parameter in considering survivability of microbes over geologic times on the frigid, arid surface of Mars that is bombarded...
Particles raining down from space offer 3-D views inside swirling tropical storms. Muons created from cosmic rays that smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere have revealed the...
Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), popularly known as UFOs, are of interest for both national security and air safety and NASA’s independent study on UAPs aligns with...
A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two tails of dust ejected from the 160-m-wide asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits a larger, 780-m-wide...
Good news for late bloomers: Planets may have millions of years more time to arise around most stars than previously thought. Planet-making disks around young stars...
The Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph instrument onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft observed 41 solar occultations by Saturn’s rings. Now, planetary researchers have compiled complete catalogs of these occultations...
The dwarf planet Haumea resides in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of the outermost planet Neptune. An artist’s conception of Haumea, its moons Hi’iaka and...
A pair of stars in our galaxy is revealing how light pushes around matter. It’s the first time anyone has directly seen how the pressure of...
Roughly 3,000 light-years from Earth sits one of the most complex and least understood nebulae, a whirling landscape of gas and dust left in the wake...
In the search for life beyond Earth, subsurface bodies of water in the outer Solar System are some of the most important targets. That’s why NASA...
