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.
Silly fringe theories about Planet X—an imagined planet typically named Nibiru that is on course to hit or pass by Earth with disastrous consequences—are the kind of thing normally relegated to vanity press-published books or those tabloids you browse in the supermarket checkout aisle. On Wednesday, they made it into…
You may think you know what a planet is, but celestial bodies often refuse to fully comply with our artificial human labels. We all thought tiny Pluto was a planet, until the 2006 vote in which the International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefinition stripped it of its title. But when is something officially too big to…
If you, like me, are tired of this world—these people—tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives, Google now allows you explore 16 other planetary bodies that are more serene than this one.
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.
If you made a building out of bricks and cinderblocks, then hundreds of years later you’d expect it to still be, well, a building made of bricks and cinderblocks. But planets are not buildings if you haven’t noticed. Earth, for instance, just doesn’t seem to have the same composition as the meteors thought to have…
On October 14, 2014, our Sun let out a great big burp, a coronal mass ejection that swept through the Solar System at an incredibly fortuitous angle. Several spacecraft (and one intrepid Martian rover) detected the solar blast, resulting in an unprecedented experiment that stretched all the way from Venus to outer…
Most asteroids orbit the Sun in a counterclockwise fashion, but a newly-discovered object nicknamed Bee-Zed goes against the grain, spinning around the Solar System the opposite way. Not only that, it frequently ventures within Jupiter’s orbital space—putting it on a potential collision course with the gas giant and…
Last week, the Cassini spacecraft began a series of dramatic, “ring-grazing orbits” that will see it fly high over Saturn’s poles before diving perilously close to the gas giant’s rings. Now, NASA has received back the first images from this exciting chapter in Cassini’s last year of life—and they do not disappoint.
New research links the odd and unexplained six-degree tilt of our Sun to an undiscovered planet in the outer reaches of our solar system. It’s even more evidence that planet Nine is for real.
A stellar view of the night sky, including all of our celestial neighbors, is dependent on countless factors like light pollution, the weather, and even the time of year. But you can guarantee that all of the planets in our solar system are visible when you go stargazing with this planetary string light set created by…
After two years of science, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission ended today in a gentle crash-landing. But if you haven’t been tracking this spacecraft’s movements as obsessively as we have, you might be wracking your brain this morning trying to remember what the Rosetta mission was.
Like an endless blaze roaring forth from the gates of hell, the solar wind is majestic, awe inspiring, and terrifying. The only proof you need that the Sun is the one and true master of our solar system is this never-before-seen view of a torrent of charged particles bursting out of our star’s corona.
Reminding us of our own fragile mortality, a large, bright comet just streaked across the sky and straight into our nearest neighboring star. You will absolutely believe what happened next because it has happened to you in a nightmare, admit it.
Reason number 9,000 not to colonize Jupiter’s moon Io: not only is it a frigid hellscape covered in eruptive ice volcanoes and lashed by the gas giant’s powerful radiation belts, but the atmosphere just collapsed.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft will be entering Jupiter’s orbit later tonight after a very long journey, kicking off the next phase of its mission. And we’ve got NASA JPL scientist Glenn Orton with us today to answer your burning questions about Jupiter, the Juno mission, what the team hopes to learn about our solar system,…
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been spinning through space on its way to Jupiter for five years and 445 million miles, and now it’s less than 10 hours away from entering the gas giant’s orbit—the equivalent of a single rotation of Jupiter. If all goes well, scientists will finally be able to learn what lies beneath…
After five years and 445 million miles, NASA’s Juno mission arrives in orbit around Jupiter on Monday to begin an unprecedented scientific study of the behemoth planet that shaped our solar system.
If you want to see beautiful auroras, forget Alaska, Canada, and Iceland—check out Jupiter. At the gas giant’s north pole, the most powerful and luminous northern lights in the solar system shimmer and glow in an endless geomagnetic storm that’s larger than our entire planet.
After months of rampant speculation, scientists announced late last year that the bright spots on dwarf planet Ceres are giant deposits of salt. Case closed, right? Not exactly. We’ve since gotten a better look at the spots, and the craters they reside in, and Ceres is shaping up to be a much weirder place than we…
