Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain While the moon lacks any breathable air, it does host a barely-there atmosphere. Since the 1980s, astronomers have observed a very thin layer of atoms bouncing…
Category: Planetary Science
Massive solar wind disturbance caused Earth’s magnetosphere to fly without its usual tail
A coronal mass ejection in April 2023 caused Earth to grow Alfvén wings. (This CME, with Earth illustrated to scale, took place in 2021.) Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO Like a supersonic jet…
Astronomers use AI to find elusive stars ‘gobbling up’ planets
Credit: NASA, ESSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI). Astronomers have recently found hundreds of “polluted” white dwarf stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. These are white dwarfs caught actively consuming…
After debris concerns, SpaceX to shift Dragon capsule landings from Florida to California
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Evidence of debris stemming from return trips of SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has prompted the company to shift future landing operations from Florida to California. The move…
The sun’s corona is weirdly hot, and Parker Solar Probe rules out one explanation
As Parker Solar Probe files around the sun, it finds abrupt reversals in the direction of the sun’s magnetic fields. These S-shaped bends in the sun’s magnetic field are very…
Ever see a star explode? You’re about to get a chance very soon
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Every clear night for the last three weeks, Bob Stephens has pointed his home telescope at the same two stars in hopes of witnessing one of…
Study examines matter distribution and supports unknown influence or new particle
Artistic reconstruction of a photon’s path through intergalactic gas. Credit: UC Riverside The dense peaks in the wavelength distribution graph observed in a Lyman-Alpha forest indeed resemble many small trees.…
A cave discovered on the moon opens up new opportunities for settlement by humans
A lunar pit in the Mare Tranquillitatis region. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University Almost 55 years after the launch of Apollo 11—the first mission to land humans on the moon—scientists have…
NASA Mars rover captures rock that could hold fossilized microbes
Perseverance drilled into this enigmatic rock to collect a core sample on July 21, as it traversed Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has made what…
Is this how you get hot Jupiters?
When we think of Jupiter-type planets, we usually picture massive cloud-covered worlds orbiting far from their stars. That distance keeps their volatile gases from vaporizing from stellar heat, similar to…
