Space & Planetary Science

Credit: Photo courtesy of NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis. MELBOURNE, FLA. -- Tucked away in a Florida Institute of Technology lab, a would-be Martian garden grows. A little more than a year after the Buz..

Earlier recent work has shown that the east, southeast and northwest regions of the Greenland ice sheet have contributed to 77% of the total mass loss over the last century. Now, researchers have used gps data to show that the east,…

Around 7 million years ago, landscapes and ecosystems across the world began changing dramatically. Subtropical regions dried out and the Sahara Desert formed in Africa. Rain forests receded and were replaced by the vast savannas and…

NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence that chemistry in the surface material on Mars contributed dynamically to the makeup of its atmosphere over time. It's another clue that the history of the Red Planet's atmosphere is more complex…

A geomagnetic storm on January 17, 2013, provided unique observations that finally resolved a long-standing scientific problem. For decades, scientists had asked how particles hitting Earth's magnetosphere were lost. A likely mechanism…

The solar system is a dusty environment, with trillions of cosmic dust particles left behind by comets and asteroids that orbit the sun. All this dust forms a relatively dense cloud through which Earth travels, sweeping up the…

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts with high altitude…

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch the star partway through the planet…

A new study shows that rocks formed by the grinding together of other rocks during earthquakes are rich in trapped hydrogen -- a finding that suggests similar seismic activity on Mars may produce enough hydrogen to support life.

The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica became an international cause for concern in the latter half of the 20th Century, but as EUMETSAT's Atmospheric Composition Product Development Team Leader Dr Christian Retscher points out,…

A new record-holder for the slowest spinning neutron star has been found thanks to clues first detected by NASA's Swift space observatory, whose science and flight operations are controlled by Penn State from the University Park campus.…

Astronomers have captured the sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart 67 million miles from Earth, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The discovery is published online in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made the first detections of X-rays from Pluto. These observations offer new insight into the space environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar system's…

For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of…

A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call 'stellar tidal disruption,' releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. Two new studies characterize tidal disruption flares…

Credit: (Image: Astrophysical Journal) In his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves over a century ago; this year, they were detected directly for the first ti..

Credit: Rajdeep Dasgupta HOUSTON -- (Sept. 5, 2016) -- Research by Rice University Earth scientists suggests that virtually all of Earth's life-giving carbon could have come from a collision a..

In the mid-1800s, astronomers surveying the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere noticed something strange: Over the course of a few years, a previously inconspicuous star named Eta Carinae grew brigh..

Credit: NASA/SDO Early in the morning of Sept. 1, 2016, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, caught both Earth and the moon crossing in front of the sun. SDO keeps a constant eye on the ..

Although Tropical Storm Madeline weakened to a depression, infrared satellite imagery showed a small burst of strength in the storm as strong thunderstorms developed near the center of the storm. On..