Various news outlets have been discussing a strange object in space, which may or may not be a planet. New measurements show that what was thought to be a brown dwarf—essentially a “failed star” that is too small to generate nuclear fusion, but too big to be a planet—might be a planet after all. But that’s far from…
By meticulously stitching together photos taken from two cameras aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, a team of scientists has compiled the most accurate maps of Pluto and Charon to date.
At this point, we’ve spotted several thousand exoplanets—there’s nothing super exciting anymore about finding a distant star with several worlds orbiting it. But today, scientists are announcing that they have seen an exoplanet in the middle of forming.
There are lots of incredible things you can do with data. Like make this incredible animation of the Martian surface, for example.
It’s an orgy of geometry, here on Earth. You got all kinds of shapes: Squares, trapezoids, even the occasional rhombus. Apples, desk-chairs, and dandelions—just an abundance of shape-having stuff. Outer space, in contrast, is minimally decorated: asteroids, stars, planets, galaxies. Big-picture stuff. We know the…
Scientists have discovered a planet a lot like Jupiter orbiting a dim star, if you can even call it a star—it’s nothing like our sun. The finding once again makes us wonder: what is a planet, anyway?
Diamonds, the super-strong and brilliant crystals of carbon atoms produced under the Earth’s crushing pressures, are typically valued for their beauty and durability. But scientists also value them for another reason: They contain all kinds of hidden messages about the Earth’s mantle. You just need the right tools to…
Physicists’ main goal is to be able to predict what will happen in the future based on patterns they’ve already observed, whether in massive systems of stars or tiny groups of atoms. Predicting changes over time usually requires developing new mathematical equations. But a researcher at California Institute of…
Beyond Neptune sits one of the stranger dwarf planets, Haumea. This icy rock receives its flattened dinosaur egg shape from its lightning-fast rotation—a day only lasts four hours there. But it gets even weirder. New evidence is consistent with the presence of a ring. A tiny ring for a tiny planet.
Recently, my colleagues at Deadspin posted a ranking of the planets. But it was mostly incorrect. After extensively researching and writing about our solar neighborhood, I feel I’m fairly qualified to take a stab at ranking these bad boys once and for all.
When you think about what makes a planet special, maybe you think about its size, its composition, how far it is from the Sun, and maybe how large its collection of apples is. You are probably not thinking about its density. But maybe you should be.
Are they stars? Are they lost planets? Brown dwarfs, the galaxy’s dark, wandering orbs, are some of space’s most perplexing features. They’re larger than Jupiter but smaller than stars, glow on their own and, well, they’re just really strange. A new analysis seems to explain at least a few of their mysteries.
Planets sort of look like big basketballs in space, floating around aimlessly. Sometimes they have rings. Other times, they look like gnocchi. More or less, to the average stargazer, planets have roughly the same shape—but a pair of scientists has just thrown a most delicious curveball into this whole equation.…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates’ grabbed the world’s attention when Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced a plan to establish a colony on Mars by 2117. Officials have been relatively mum about the details of the “Mars 2117 Project”—but today, a person helping to lead the…
The Pluto-shaped void in our hearts has yet to be filled by Planet 9, copious amounts of Ben & Jerry’s, or anything. Ever since the summer of 2015, when NASA’s New Horizons performed a six-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons, fans of the dwarf planet have wondered if or when we’d ever go back.…
When we think of dwarf planets, the first thing that comes to mind is obviously the injustice of Pluto getting demoted to one. But the truth is, these little guys—and there are six currently recognized within our solar system—deserve just as much love as their mightier planetary cousins. Good news for them: a new…
Millennials have already lost so much: A relatively secure housing market, the hope of stable careers, and an Earth that wasn’t completely littered with the mistakes of Baby Boomers. So when Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006, it was another nail in our fragile hearts. But that hasn’t stopped astronomers of…
Last month, the solar system lost its collective chill when NASA announced the discovery of a seven-planet system called TRAPPIST-1, just 39 light-years from our Sun. The system is particularly exciting, not only because of its proximity to our planet, but because it has three planets within the habitable zone, where…
At the center of the galaxy sits Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole around four million times the mass of the Sun. If an unlucky star ventures too close, the black hole’s gravity tears it to shreds.
