Category Astronomy/Space

Over the last two decades, scientists have found ice in many locations on Mars. Most Martian ice has been observed from orbital satellites like NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But determining the grain size and dust content of the ice from that far above the surface is challenging. And those aspects of the ice are crucial in helping scientists determine how old the ice is and how it was deposited.

So planetary scientists Aditya Khuller and Philip Christensen of Arizona State University, with Stephen Warren, an Earth ice and snow expert from the University of Washing...

Astronomers calculate that the Oort Cloud may be home to more visiting objects than objects that belong to our solar system. In 2019, astronomers spotted something incredible in our backyard: a rogue comet from another star system. Named Borisov, the icy snowball traveled 110,000 miles per hour and marked the first and only interstellar comet ever detected by humans.

But what if these interstellar visitors — comets, meteors, asteroids and other debris from beyond our solar system — are more common than we think?

In a new study published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) present new calculations showing that in the Oort Clou...

The same phenomenon that causes aurorae—the magical curtains of green light often visible from the polar regions of the Earth—causes mesospheric ozone layer depletion. This depletion could have significance for global climate change and therefore, understanding this phenomenon is important.

Now, a group of scientists led by Prof. Yoshizumi Miyoshi from Nagoya University, Japan, has observed, analyzed, and provided greater insight into this phenomenon. The findings are published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

In the Earth’s magnetosphere—the region of...

It’s suspected that about 5,000 years ago a comet may swept within 23 million miles of the Sun, closer than the innermost planet Mercury...