Solar System
Pluto and Other Kuiper Belt Objects Started Out With Water Oceans, and Have Been Slowly Freezing Solid for Billions of Years
It seems unlikely that an ocean could persist on a world that never gets closer than 30 astronomical units from…
NASA Thinks it’s Time to Return to Neptune With its Trident Mission
Is it time to head back to Neptune and its moon Triton? It might be. After all, we have some…
New Pictures of Phobos, Seen in the Infrared
NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter doesn't get a lot of headlines lately. It was sent to Mars in 2001, to detect…
Titan is Drifting Away from Saturn Surprisingly Quickly
Where did Saturn's bizarro-moon Titan form? Did it form where it is now, or has it migrated? We have decades…
Maybe the Elusive Planet 9 Doesn’t Exist After All
Oh Planet Nine, when will you stop toying with us? Whether you call it Planet Nine, Planet X, the Perturber,…
The Solar System Might Not Exist if There Wasn’t a Huge Galactic Collision with the Milky Way Billions of Years Ago
The Milky Way has a number of satellite galaxies; nearly 60 of them, depedending on how we define them. One…
Jupiter is so Big that our Solar System almost had two Suns
About half of all the star systems in the galaxy are made of pairs or triplets of stars. Our solar…
Nutrient-Poor and Energy-Starved. How Life Might Survive at the Extremes in the Solar System
Our growing understanding of extremophiles here on Earth has opened up new possibilities in astrobiology. Scientists are taking another look…
OSIRIS-REx Flew 620 Meters Above its Landing Site. Confirms that it’s a Boulder-Strewn Nightmare, Just Like the Rest of Bennu
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached its target, asteroid Bennu (101955 Bennu), on December 3rd, 2018. Since then, the spacecraft has been…
We Know We’re Made of Stardust. But Did it Come From Red Giants?
We've all heard this one: when you drink a glass of water, that water has already been through a bunch…