Solar System
These Ancient Microbes Give a Glimpse of What Extraterrestrial Life Might Look Like
Will we discover simple life somewhere? Maybe on Enceladus or Europa in our Solar System, or further away on an…
JWST Also Looked Inside the Solar System, at Jupiter and its Moons
After the ‘big reveal’ earlier this week of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first full color images and spectra of…
A Swarm of Swimming Robots to Search for Life Under the Ice on Europa
When Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter 400 years ago, he saw three blobs of light around the giant planet,…
When did the Sun Blow Away the Solar Nebula?
The story of our solar system's origin is pretty well known. It goes like this: the Sun began as a…
It Would Take About 100 Billion Years for Another Star to Pass Close Enough to Make the Solar System Unstable
A new study by a team of Canadian researchers shows that our Solar System will not experience a close and…
This is What the Metal Asteroid Psyche Might Look Like
If you wanted to do a forensic study of the Solar System, you might head for the main asteroid belt…
The Early Solar System was Total Mayhem
There's no question that young solar systems are chaotic places. Cascading collisions defined our young Solar System as rocks, boulders,…
Did a 5th Giant Planet Mess up the Orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune?
The solar system’s current planetary orbits seem stable, but that’s only because the planets have settled into them over billions…
Pluto’s Orbit is Surprisingly Close to an Unstable Zone
A new study has revealed new insights into Pluto's orbit, which is subject to a lot of chaotic perturbance over…
The Sun is Slowly Tearing This Comet Apart
Using ground-based and space-based observations, a team of researchers has been monitoring a difficult-to-see comet carefully. It's called Comet 323P/SOHO,…