Category Astronomy/Space

In the same way that earthquakes cause our planet to rumble, oscillations in the interior of Saturn make the gas giant jiggle around ever so slightly. Those motions, in turn, cause ripples in Saturn’s rings.

In a new study accepted in the journal Nature Astronomy, two Caltech astronomers have analyzed those rippling rings to reveal new information about the core of Saturn. For their study, they used older data captured by NASA’s Cassini, a spacecraft that orbited the ringed giant for 13 years before it dove into the planet’s atmosphere and disintegrated in 2017.

The findings suggest that the planet’s core is not a hard ball of rock, as some previous theories had proposed, but a diffuse soup of ice, roc...

The Ophiuchus star-forming complex offers an analog for the formation of the solar sys...

Anomalies in the distribution of hydrogen at Occator crater on the dwarf planet Ceres reveal an icy crust, says a new paper led by Tom Prettyman, a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

The evidence comes from data acquired by the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRaND) aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft...

Researchers have developed a novel technique to investigate the dynamics of the early Solar System by analyzing magnetites in meteorites utilizing the wave nature of electrons.

Within meteorites, the magnetic fields associated with the particles that make up the object can act as a historical record. By analyzing such magnetic fields, scientists can deduce the probable events that affected the object and reconstruct a time-lapse of what events occurred on the meteorite and when.

“Primitive meteorites are time capsules of primordial materials formed at the beginning of our Solar System,” said Yuki Kimura, an associate professor at the Institute of Low Temperature Sci...