Category Astronomy/Space

In 1998, the journal Nature published a seminal letter concluding that a mysterious signal, which had been discovered while analyzing the polarization of sunlight, implies that the solar chromosphere (an important layer of the solar atmosphere) is practically unmagnetised, in sharp contradiction with common wisdom. This paradox motivated laboratory experiments and theoretical investigations, which instead of providing a solution, raised new issues, and even led some scientists to question the quantum theory of matter-radiation interaction.

Researchers at the Istituto Ricerche Solari (IRSOL) in Locarno-Monti (affiliated to USI Università della Svizzera italiana), and the Instituto de Astrofísica de C...

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...