Category Astronomy/Space

How can a planet be “hotter than hot?” The answer is when heavy metals are detected escaping from the planet’s atmosphere, instead of condensing into clouds.

Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal magnesium and iron gas streaming from the strange world outside our solar system known as WASP-121b...

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission designed to comb the heavens for exoplanets, has discovered its first potentially habitable world outside of our own solar system – and an international team of astronomers has characterized the super-Earth, about 31 light-years away, named GJ 357 d.

“This is exciting, as this is TESS’s first discovery of a nearby super-Earth that could harbor life – TESS is a small, mighty mission with a huge reach,” said Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy, director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute and a member of the TESS science team.

The exoplanet is more massive than our own blue planet, and Kaltenegger said the discovery will provide insight into Earth’s heavyweight planetary cousins...

Fifty years after the first landing on the Moon, scientists have combined new geochemical information to determine the Moon’s age using samples from different Apollo missions. After the formation of the solar system, 4.56 billion years ago, the Moon formed approximately 4.51 billion years ago. The new study has thus determined that the Moon is significantly older than previously believed – earlier research had estimated the Moon to have formed approximately 150 million years after solar system’s formation. To achieve these results, the scientists analysed the chemical composition of a diverse range of samples collected during the Apollo missions...

The image, based on observations from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, shows the largest mountain on the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn was the first mission to orbit an object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and spent time at both large asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is one of just five recognised dwarf planets in the Solar System (Pluto being another). Dawn entered orbit around this rocky world on 6 March 2015, and studied its icy, cratered, uneven surface until it ran out of fuel in October of 2018.

One of the features spotted by the mission is shown here in this reconstructed perspective view: a mountain named Ahuna Mons...