Tagged: planet

Quakes on Mars have unveiled its interior to an unprecedented degree, revealing surprising details about the Red Planet’s crust, mantle and core. Measurements taken by NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander have uncovered details, including a crustal layer that...

Earth, our home, is the third planet from the sun. While scientists continue to hunt for clues of life beyond Earth, our home planet remains the only place in the universe where we’ve ever identified living organisms. Earth is the fifth-largest planet in the solar...

Earth’s lopsided core growth Far beneath our feet, Earth’s inner core is solid iron, very hot and very dense. It’s surrounded by a molten iron-nickel outer core (whose flow generates Earth’s magnetic field) and a rocky mantle that’s mostly solid but which, over eons of...

The planets are a dynamic bunch, and throughout the year as seen from Earth, these celestial bodies appear not only to move across the sky but also to brighten and fade in turn. A planet’s distance from Earth is probably the most significant factor governing...

Astronomers have imaged something near the star Alpha Centauri A, in the star system next door to our sun, just 4.4 light-years away. Is it an asteroid, or dust, or an image glitch, or … a planet? If it is a planet, it’s the first...

Can planets shrink? New research from the Flatiron Institute in New York City suggests they can. Shrinking planets might be the solution to the mystery gap in the sizes of exoplanets discovered so far. Planets between 1.5 and two times Earth’s radius are mostly missing....

Nearly 40 years ago, scientists first predicted the existence of helium rain inside planets composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, such as Jupiter and Saturn. However, achieving the experimental conditions necessary to validate this hypothesis hasn’t been possible—until now. In a paper published today by...

On their long journey to form planets, dust grains may coalesce with each other much earlier than previously thought, simulations by RIKEN astrophysicists suggest1. This may mean revisiting conventional theories of planet formation. Massive planets start off life as specks of dust that are too...

While scientists have amassed considerable knowledge of the rocky planets in our solar system, like Earth and Mars, much less is known about the icy water-rich planets, Neptune and Uranus. In a new study recently published in Nature Astronomy, a team of scientists recreated the...