Category Astronomy/Space

Scientists at Columbia University and Imperial College London have found that the largest canyon system in the solar system is still active and shaping Mars today, billions of years after it first formed.

New research presents direct seismic evidence that a marsquake (Mars’s equivalent of an earthquake) detected by NASA’s InSight lander originated beneath the vast Martian canyon system, Valles Marineris, and was caused by rocks slipping along a fault deep within the planet’s crust.

The finding suggests that faults established during the formation and early evolution of Valles Marineris billions of years ago can remain weak enough to rupture under stresses acting on Mars today.

“Valles Marineris is one of the most spectacular geological structures anywh...

The ocean beneath Saturn’s moon Enceladus lies under kilometers of ice, but some of its contents do reach the surface. Jets near the south pole spray out water vapor and icy particles, offering a way to investigate the hidden ocean without drilling down to it.

The challenge is knowing which material preserves the most useful clues. A new laboratory study points to a possible target: salt crystals that trap tiny pockets of water as they grow during freezing.

Liam Perera of Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom and colleagues found these pockets inside natron, a sodium carbonate mineral expected to form on Enceladus...

Scientists may have solved a long-standing mystery about why the Moon’s two sides are so different, using samples collected from its farside for the first time. Their findings suggest that uneven heating from Earth’s gravitational pull drove enormous flows of ancient magma, creating the dramatically different lunar landscapes we see today.

Scientists investigating why the Moon’s two sides look so different have uncovered new evidence that could help explain this long-standing mystery. A research team led by Professor Hejiu Hui of Nanjing University analyzed lunar rocks collected by China’s Chang’e-6 (CE6) mission and found clues suggesting that enormous movements of molten rock shaped the Moon billions of years ago.

The researchers examined the chemical compositions of three t...

The fate of our solar system is written in the stars—well, one star to be precise: the sun. Estimates of what the end will look like once the sun sheds much of its mass and ultimately dies vary widely. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the final curtain for some of the outer planets will arrive much sooner than previously thought, shrinking the timeline from a quintillion years down to roughly 1 billion years.

The rock we live on will probably be long gone by then, but Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune might not make it either.

Traditional models assumed that the outer solar system would survive for billions of years before a passing star might disturb it...