Avoiding the Great Filter. How Long Until We’re Living Across the Solar System?
According to a new study, humanity could become an interplanetary species in this century, interstellar by the 23rd, and intragalactic by the 24th.
InSight has Mapped out the Interior of Mars, Revealing the Sizes of its Crust, Mantle, and Core
In a series of newly-published papers, NASA scientists have shown how InSight’s seismic data allowed them to measure the structure and thickness of Mars’ interior.
There are Probably Many More Earth-Sized Worlds Than Previously Believed
In the past decade, the discovery of extrasolar planets has accelerated immensely. To date, 4,424 exoplanets have been confirmed in 3,280 star systems, with another 7,453 awaiting confirmation. So far, most of these planets have been gas giants, with about 66% being similar to Jupiter or Neptune, while another 30% have been giant rocky planets …
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Bad News, Life Probably can’t Exist on Venus. Good News, it Could be in Jupiter’s Clouds
A new NASA-supported study by an international team of researchers has determined that life is more likely to exist in the clouds on Jupiter than on Venus
How To Search the Chemical Makeup of Exoplanet Atmospheres for Hints at Their History
Author’s note – this article was written with Dr. Vincent Kofman, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), working in the Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC), and the lead author on the research it discusses. Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the recent decades. Planet hunters like TESS and Kepler, as well as numerous …
There Might be Volcanoes at the Bottom of Europa’s sub-ice Oceans
In about three years, NASA plans to launch a robotic orbiter that will study Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa. It’s called the Europa Clipper mission, which will spend four years orbiting Europa to learn more about its ice sheet, interior structure, chemical composition, and plume activity. In the process, NASA hopes to find evidence that will …
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Zhurong is Rolling on Mars
China’s Zhurong rover has departed from its lander and commenced science operations, and has the pictures to prove it!
The Elements for Life Depend on Both how and Where a Planet Forms
A new study by a team from Rice University has shown that where a planet forms in its star system could have a drastic effect on whether or not it can support life.
A Recent Megaflare Shows that Proxima Centauri is not a Nice Place to Live
A new international research effort observed a massive solar flare from Proxima Centauri, which indicates (yet again) that its not a habitable system.
Meteorites Hold Early Atmospheres From Across the Solar System
Since they were formed in the early solar system, many meteorites offer an unadulterated view into what that solar system was made out of, or what happened to it as we reported before. Recently a team of researchers led by Maggie Thompson at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) took a look at the chemical …
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