Saturn’s rings and tilt might have come from one missing moon

A single, doomed moon could clear up a couple of mysteries about Saturn. This hypothetical missing moon, dubbed Chrysalis, could have helped tilt Saturn over, researchers suggest September 15 in…

Passing through the Milky Way’s arms may have helped form Earth’s solid ground

Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents. Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral…

The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere

The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system. “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,”…

A protogalaxy in the Milky Way may be our galaxy’s original nucleus

The Milky Way left its “poor old heart” in and around the constellation Sagittarius, astronomers report. New data from the Gaia spacecraft reveal the full extent of what seems to…

Passing through the Milky Way’s arms may have helped form Earth’s solid ground

Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents. Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral…

Here’s the James Webb telescope’s first direct image of an exoplanet

This is the first picture of an exoplanet from the James Webb Space Telescope. “We’re actually measuring photons from the atmosphere of the planet itself,” says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of…

The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere

The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system. “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,”…

The discovery of the Kuiper Belt revamped our view of the solar system

On a Hawaiian mountaintop in the summer of 1992, a pair of scientists spotted a pinprick of light inching through the constellation Pisces. That unassuming object — located over a…

Not one, but two asteroids might have slain the dinosaurs

Chicxulub, the asteroid that wiped out most dinosaurs, might have had a little sibling. Off the coast of West Africa, hundreds of meters beneath the seafloor, scientists have identified what…

Oort cloud comets may spin themselves to death

Comets from the solar system’s deep freezer often don’t survive their first encounter with the sun. Now one scientist thinks he knows why: Solar warmth makes some of the cosmic…