Category Astronomy/Space

It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable world than our closest planetary neighbor. With an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide, and a surface hot enough to melt lead, Venus is a scorched and suffocating wasteland where life as we know it could not survive. The planet’s clouds are similarly hostile, blanketing the planet in droplets of sulfuric acid caustic enough to burn a hole through human skin.

And yet, a new study supports the longstanding idea that if life exists, it might make a home in Venus’ clouds...

Every so often, the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud throw galactic snowballs made up of ice, dust and rocks our way: 4.6-billion-year-old leftovers from the formation of the solar system.

These snowballs—or as we know them, comets—go through a colorful metamorphosis as they cross the sky, with many comets’ heads turning a radiant green color that gets brighter as they approach the Sun.

But strangely, this green shade disappears before it reaches the one or two tails trailing behind the comet.

Astronomers, scientists and chemists have been puzzled by this mystery for almost a century...

Scientists have unravelled a fascinating new insight into how the landscape of the dwarf-planet Pluto has formed. A team of international researchers, including Dr Adrien Morison from the University of Exeter, has shown how vast ice forms have been shaped in one of the planet’s largest craters, Sputnik Planita.

Perhaps the most striking feature on Pluto’s surface, Sputnik Planitia is an impact crater, consisting of a bright plain, slightly larger than France, and filled with nitrogen ice.

For the new study, researchers have used sophisticated modelling techniques to show that t...

Krypton from the Earth’s mantle, collected from geologic hot spots in Iceland and the Galapagos Islands, reveals a clearer picture of how our planet formed, according to new research from the University of California, Davis.

The different isotopes of krypton are chemical fingerprints for scientists sleuthing out the ingredients that made the Earth, such as solar wind particles and meteorites from the inner and outer solar system...