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 our best bet in…
Category: Planetary Science
Enceladus is blanketed in a thick layer of snow
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 Buffalo, but worse,” says…
Methylated gases could be an unambiguous indicator of alien life
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 as they tidy up…
Io may have an underworld magma ocean or a hot metal heart
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 moon is covered in…
The last vital ingredient for life has been discovered on Enceladus
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 construct DNA and RNA.…
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the sound of a dust devil on Mars
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 dusty whirlwinds before. But…
The pristine Winchcombe meteorite suggests that Earth’s water came from asteroids
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. The rock blazed in…
Marsquakes hint that the planet might be volcanically active after all
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 probably caused by magma…
Ancient bacteria could persist beneath Mars’ surface
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 — to the Red…
NASA’s DART mission successfully shoved an asteroid
It worked! Humanity has, for the first time, purposely moved a celestial object. As a test of a potential asteroid-deflection scheme, NASA’s DART spacecraft shortened the orbit of asteroid Dimorphos…
