Hot on the tail of the Quadrantids meteor shower, another spectacle in the sky is about to arrive: comet Atlas C/2024 G3, which will reach perihelion—the point of its orbit closest to the sun—on January 13. On the same day, we will also see it at its closest point to Earth, and it could become […]
It’s hard to say which was the bigger space celebrity in 2024: the sun, or the moon. Right from the outset, the moon was the place to be. In January, Japan became the fifth nation to join the 238,000-mile-high club when its “Moon Sniper” mission completed the most precise lunar landing in history — despite […]
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just solved a 20-year-old mystery about how ancient stars could host massive planets. In the early 2000s, the Hubble Space Telescope observed the oldest planet everan object 2.5 times as large as Jupiter that formed in the Milky Way 13 billion years ago, less than a billion years […]
Scientists’ best theories on how planets form could be wrong, new research suggests. Astronomers studying a still-forming planet beyond our solar system have found that its chemical makeup doesn’t fully match the swirling gas and dust disk from which it formed. The finding challenges standard models of planet formation and implies they may be overly […]
A “domino effect” may occur in star systems whereby newly formed planets close to a star help … [+] shepherd dust and gas to create more planets farther out in the system. getty Astronomers using a mountain covered in 66 radio telescopes have revealed a “domino effect” or chain reaction mechanism where the formation of […]
Newly discovered Earth-size planet TOI 700 e orbits within the habitable zone of its star in this illustration. New research questions whether planets are necessary for life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Robert Hurt Do we have a planetary bias when it comes to understanding where life can perpetuate? It’s only natural that we do. After all, we’re on […]
Mysterious pairs of “rogue,” Jupiter-size objects may have arisen from embryonic stars, a new study suggests. The theory could explain some characteristics of these Jupiter-mass binary objects (JuMBOs), such as why members of each pair are so widely separated, but more data is needed to confirm the idea. The James Webb Space Telescope spotted these […]
Jupiter is easy to observe at night with our unaided eyes, as well-documented by the ancient astronomers who carefully recorded its slow movements from night to night. It can be one of the brightest objects in our nighttime skies, bested only by the Moon, Venus, and occasionally Mars, when the red planet is at opposition. […]
A NASA study using a series of supercomputer simulations reveals a potential new solution to a longstanding Martian mystery: How did Mars get its moons? The first step, the findings say, may have involved the destruction of an asteroid. The research team, led by Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s […]
When it came to discovering Neptune, scientists didn’t need to see to believe. The eighth planet in our solar system was detected, not with telescopes, but through math. In 1846, scientists had observed irregularities in Uranus’ orbit, as if an invisible counterweight were tugging on the planet from the far side. From these observations, researchers […]
