Category Astronomy/Space

Total human carbon dioxide emissions could match those of Earth’s last major greenhouse warming event in fewer than five generations, new research finds...

Astronomers call it “the moon that shouldn’t be there.” After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.

The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, is unusually close to a much larger Neptunian moon called Proteus...

Scientists have discovered tadpole-shaped jets coming out of regions with intense magnetic fields on the Sun. Unlike those living on Earth, these “tadpoles” – formally called pseudo-shocks – are made entirely of plasma, the electrically conducting material made of charged particles that account for an estimated 99% of the observable universe. The discovery adds a new clue to one of the longest-standing mysteries in astrophysics.

For 150 years scientists have been trying to figure out why the wispy upper atmosphere of the Sun – the corona is over 200 times hotter than the solar surface...

Researchers have discovered that carbonaceous chondrites, a class of meteorites, incorporated hydrated minerals along with organic material from the protoplanetary disk before the formation of planets. Scientists from the study published in the journal Space Science Reviews note that these meteorites played “an important role in the primordial Earth’s water enrichment” because they facilitated the transportation of volatile elements that were accumulated on the external regions of the so-called protoplanetary disk from which planets were formed more than 4.500 years ago. Earth was formed in an environment close to the Sun, very much reduced due to the relative lack of oxygen.

Carbonaceous chondrites come fro...