1+ day, 8+ hour ago   (335+ words) Venus likely never had a moon and even if it did it would have soon been torn asunder by the planet’s own gravity, says prominent planetary astrophysicist....

4+ day, 17+ hour ago   (543+ words) The Giant Impact Hypothesis says that about 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized world named Theia slammed into the young Earth. The cataclysmic impact sent debris into a torus orbiting Earth, and out of that material the Moon formed. The hypothesis…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (217+ words) For the study, the researchers focused on whether peptides, which consist of short amino acid chains, could survive within the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus. To accomplish this, the researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments using nuclear magnetic resonance…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (188+ words) In 1992, Centaur 450P/LONEOS had a close encounter with Saturn, shifting its orbit closer to the Sun. Now astronomers can observe how a small icy body transforms into a comet over time....

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (824+ words) The planet Mars is a cold and dry world completely devoid of life, but billions of years ago things were much different. This is when Mars had a much warmer interior than it does today, resulting in active volcanism that…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (134+ words) Sure. It’s just another image of Phobos crossing the disk of the Sun, as seen from the surface of Mars. Like so much of the modern space era, these images, once amazing, are now almost routine. But there’s some real…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (840+ words) The planet Jupiter hosts more than 100 moons with the majority of attention going to the four Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. This is primarily due to their active geology, including Io being the most volcanically active planetary body…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (130+ words) At least once in our lives, we’ve all seen a bright streak of light briefly blaze across the sky and have quickly referred to it as an asteroid, meteor, shooting star, comet, or some other whimsical name we’ve heard others…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (422+ words) When a meteoroid hits the Moon's surface, it does more than just dig up a little dirt. It actually excavates a little bit of cosmic history that recorded a long-ago supernova explosion. Scientists at the University of Hawaii Institute of…...

2+ week, 9+ hour ago   (367+ words) Those little dust grains that fall to Earth during meteor showers or end up as part of larger meteorites found on Earth may hold surprising clues to the formation of the Sun. That's because they record the state of the…...