International team of astronomers has found a planet further out than any other in a sun-like system, and it has many astronomers baffled. There were two things immediately puzzling about it: its mass, which came in at an immense 2 × 1025 metric
Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn's north pole.
This is the first hexagon movie of its kind, using color filters, and the first to show a complete view of
The presence of atmospheric water was reported previously on a few planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system, but a paper published yesterday in Astrophysical Journal is the first one that conclusively measured and compared the profiles and
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission is scheduled for launch today, November 18, 2013. The two-hour launch window opens at 18:28 UTC. This will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere and what
Billions of years ago when the Red Planet was young, it appears to have had a thick atmosphere that was warm enough to support oceans of liquid water – a critical ingredient for life. The animation shows how the surface of Mars might have appeared during this
When you take a look at Mars, you probably wouldn't think that it looks like a nice place to live. It's dry, it's dusty, and there's practically no atmosphere. But some scientists think that Mars may have once looked like a much nicer place to live,
New compilation video from images taken by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft was released online on October 28, 2013. This video is compiled from images of nearly 12 500 orbits by the Mars Express, gathered from June 2003 by the High Resolution Stereo
Symbols of an Alien Sky will introduce you to celestial spectacles and earth-shaking events once remembered around the world. Archaic symbols of these events still surround us, some as icons of the world’s great religions, though the origins of the symbols appear
On the exoplanet Kepler 7b, the weather is highly predictable, an international team of scientists has found: On any given day, the exoplanet, which orbits a star nearly 1,000 light-years from Earth, is heavily overcast on one side, while the other side likely enjoys
Measurements obtained with ESA's Venus Express spacecraft have shed new light on the interaction between the solar wind and the second planet from the Sun. During a rare period of very low density solar outflow, the ionosphere of Venus was observed to become
