ScienceDaily | Solar System News
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Solar System Planets. Astronomy articles on the eight planets, plus the two dwarf planets, Pluto and Eris. Great pictures of everything in the solar system. Updated daily.
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
2d ago
The mystery of how Pluto got a giant heart-shaped feature on its surface has finally been solved by an international team of astrophysicists. The team is the first to successfully reproduce the unusual shape with numerical simulations, attributing it to a giant and slow oblique-angle impact ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
4d ago
An international research team has for the first time directly detected stellar winds from three Sun-like stars by recording the X-ray emission from their astrospheres, and placed constraints on the mass loss rate of the stars via their stellar winds ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
1w ago
The CHEOPS space telescope is providing new information on the mysterious exoplanet WASP-76b. This ultra-hot giant is characterized by an asymmetry between the amount of light observed on its eastern terminator -- the fictitious line that separates its night side from its day side -- and that observed on its western terminator. This peculiarity is thought to be due to a 'glory', a luminous phenomenon similar to a rainbow, which occurs if the light from the star -- the 'sun' around which the exoplanet orbits -- is reflected by clouds made up of a perfectly uniform substance. If this hypothesis ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
3w ago
Researchers found that the double-lobed object, which is officially named Kuiper Belt Object 486958 Arrokoth and resembles a snowman, may have ancient ices stored deep within it from when the object first formed billions of years ago ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
3w ago
How much time do planets have to form from a swirling disk of gas and dust around a star? A new study gives scientists a better idea of how our own solar system came to be ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
3w ago
Could life be found in frozen sea spray from moons orbiting Saturn or Jupiter? New research finds that life can be detected in a single ice grain containing one bacterial cell or portions of a cell. The results suggest that if life similar to that on Earth exists on these planetary bodies, that this life should be detectable by instruments launching in the fall ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
1M ago
The period that liquid water was present on the surface of Mars may have been shorter than previously thought. Channel landforms called gullies, previously thought to be formed exclusively by liquid water, can also be formed by the action of evaporating CO2 ice, according to a new study ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
1M ago
Sand ripples are symmetrical. Yet wind -- which causes them -- is very much not. Furthermore, sand ripples can be found on Mars and on Earth. They would be even more fascinating if the same effect found on Mars could be found here on Earth as well. What if one unified theory could explain their formation on both planets ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
1M ago
Geologists determined the original orientation of many of the Mars bedrock samples collected by the Perseverance rover. The findings can give scientists clues to the conditions in which the rocks originally formed ..read more
ScienceDaily | Solar System News
1M ago
Astrobiologists have devised a novel way to determine ocean temperatures of distant worlds based on the thickness of their ice shells, effectively conducting oceanography from space ..read more