planet

The Juno probe has been tasked with studying a leviathan: Jupiter, the heavyweight of the Solar System, King of the Planets.But a planet the size of Jupiter, nearly 318 times the mass of Earth, isn't without its friends.  The gas giant…

An artist’s conception of the early Earth. Credit: Simone Marchi/SwRI Researchers at Yale and Caltech have a bold new theory to explain how Earth transformed itself from a fiery, carbon-clouded ball of rocks into a planet capable of…

ChartFor the second month in a row, we’re going to use the moon as a signpost as we limber up for the big November challenge of seeing planet Uranus with our naked eyes.The chart shows the view looking west-south-west from London at 1930…

Early Earth is often described as 'Hadean' for good reason. Arising from the ashes of a collision that gave us our Moon, the primordial eon was characterized by hellish heat trapped beneath a thick blanket of carbon dioxide and water…

Ceres might be spewing cryovolcanoes in yet another spot on the dwarf planet's surface.Close-up pictures from NASA's Dawn mission that orbited Ceres between 2015 and 2018 revealed salt deposits in a crater known as Urvara, spotted for…

Not all planetary systems are alike. Out there in the big, wide galaxy, a number of different configurations have been spotted, some vastly different from our home system. These include extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that orbit not…

An artist’s illustration of the hot Jupiter with a wacky weather pattern.Illustration: Engine House VFXNew observations of the football-shaped exoplanet known as WASP-121b have revealed clues to its atmosphere and weather. Astronomers…

We tend to think of intelligence as something that describes just one individual. But it's possible to describe all kinds of collectives as intelligent, too – whether we're talking about social groups of humans, enclaves of insects, or…

Almost a century ago, the revolutionary idea of the biosphere gained a foothold in science. Defined as the collective activity of all life on Earth—the tapestry of actions of every microbe, plant, and animal—the biosphere had profound…

An artist’s impression of the newly-discovered planet orbiting Proxima Centauri.Credit: ESO/L. Calçada Astronomers have discovered a third planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest…