Planets/Moons

Silica aerogel could warm the Martian surface similar to the way greenhouse gasses keep Earth warmCredit: Harvard SEAS People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the…

Credit: Elle Starkman / PPPL Office of Communications Vast rings of electrically charged particles encircle the Earth and other planets. Now, a team of scientists has completed research into waves that travel through this magnetic,…

Credit: Zac Cooper/University of Washington In recent years, the idea of life on other planets has become less far-fetched. NASA announced June 27 that it will send a vehicle to Saturn's icy moon, Titan, a celestial body known to harbor…

Astronomers report first observations of a 'circumplanetary disk'Credit: A. Isella, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)) Using Earth's most powerful array of radio telescopes, astronomers have made the first observations of a…

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) A. Isella; ESO Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have made the first-ever observations of a circumplanetary disk, the planet-girding belt of dust and gas that…

UMD physicist for Apollo experiment gets chance to send next gen version to moonCredit: Doug Currie, University of Maryland COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- In 1969, University of Maryland physicist Doug Currie helped design three…

Credit: The University of Texas at Arlington A chemist at The University of Texas at Arlington has engineered a device capable of collecting drops of liquid as it travels through space and analyzing their content for conditions that…

An international team of researchers has succeeded in measuring the current system responsible for Jupiter's aurora. Using data transmitted to Earth by NASA's Juno spacecraft, they showed that the direct currents were much weaker than…

As our solar system was forming nearly four and a half billion years ago, a planet-sized object struck the early Earth, leading to the formation of the moon, possibly from a hot, spinning cloud of rock vapor called a synestia. But after…

ITHACA, N.Y. - Using nature's color palette from early Earth, Cornell University astronomers have created a cosmic "cheat sheet" in order to understand where discovered exoplanets may fall along their own evolutionary spectrum. Jack…