Category Astronomy/Space

For years, astronomers have been searching for a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the dark outer reaches of our solar system. Now, a team of researchers have taken a completely different approach to this cosmic detective story—instead of looking for reflected sunlight, they’re hunting for the planet’s own heat signature.

The story begins with a puzzle in the outer solar system. Scientists noticed that small icy bodies called Kuiper Belt Objects, which orbit far beyond Neptune, seem to be clustered together in unusual ways...

Every breath we take in contains 21% oxygen, the gas that makes life on Earth possible. Oxygen, in its combined oxide state, has always been abundant in Earth’s crust, but elemental diatomic oxygen became part of our atmosphere around 2.4 to 2.5 billion years ago as a gift from cyanobacteria, which triggered the Great Oxidation Event and breathed life into Earth.

A joint venture between NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Leeds discovered that the Earth’s magnetic field strength and atmospheric oxygen levels over the past 540 years have seemed to spike and dip at the same time, showing a strong, statistically significant correlation between the two.

This correlation could arise from unexpected connections between geophysical processes in Earth’s deep interior,...

Southwest Research Institute has collaborated with Yale University to summarize the scientific community’s notable progress in advancing the understanding of the formation and evolution of the inner rocky planets, the so-called terrestrial planets. Their paper focuses on late accretion’s role in the long-term evolution of terrestrial planets, including their distinct geophysical and chemical properties as well as their potential habitability.

The Review paper is published in the journal Nature.

Solar systems form when clouds of gas and dust begin to coalesce. Gravity pulls these elements together, forming a central star, like our sun, surrounded by a flattened disk of consolidating materials...

An international team of scientists led by astronomers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison has produced the most accurate measurement of the gases swirling around young stars and how their mass changes over time. The discovery joins many pieces of a puzzle that may reveal which kinds of planets form—rocky Earth-types, gas giants like Jupiter, or balls of ice in the Neptune mold—as star systems mature.

The researchers used an array of 66 massive radio telescopes, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, perched at 16,000 feet in the Chilean Andes Mountains, to study the disks of gas spinning in the gravity of each of 3...