Astronomers are pretty sure they know where the moon came from. In the early solar system, a Mars-sized object dubbed Theia smashed into Earth. This cataclysmic collision knocked a huge mass of material into orbit, which ...
Planetary Sciences
Apr 4, 2024
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For nearly 50 years, NASA's Voyager 1 mission has competed for the title of deep space's little engine that could. Launched in 1977 along with its twin, Voyager 2, the spacecraft is now soaring more than 15 billion miles ...
Space Exploration
Mar 18, 2024
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258
In 2008, astronomers with the SuperWASP survey spotted WASP-12b as it transited in front of its star. At the time, it was part of a new class of exoplanets ("hot Jupiters") discovered a little more than a decade before. However, ...
Planetary Sciences
Mar 11, 2024
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The way astronomers study planets in our own solar system is surprisingly similar to the way they study exoplanets, despite the latter being orders of magnitude more distant. The key is spectroscopy—examining the wavelengths ...
Planetary Sciences
Dec 18, 2023
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Astronomers from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and elsewhere, report the discovery of a new 'warm Jupiter' exoplanet orbiting a rapidly rotating F-type star. The newfound alien world, designated ...
The James Webb Space Telescope observed the exoplanet WASP-80 b as it passed in front of and behind its host star, revealing spectra indicative of an atmosphere containing methane gas and water vapor. While water vapor has ...
Planetary Sciences
Nov 22, 2023
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472
On 17 November 2023, ESA's Juice spacecraft carried out one of the largest and most important maneuvers in its eight-year journey to Jupiter.
Space Exploration
Nov 20, 2023
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31
A team of astronomers and astrophysicists affiliated with several institutions in China, working with one colleague from Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi, in Italy, and another from the University of Utah, in the U.S., has found ...
Jupiter's ocean moons capture most of our attention because of their potential habitability. But Io, Jupiter's bad-boy volcanic moon, is in a class of its own. There's nothing else like it in the solar system, and NASA's ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 20, 2023
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83
As we began to discover hundreds, then thousands of exoplanets, we found that there were two types of worlds unlike anything in our solar system. The first are super-Earths. These worlds straddle the line between large rocky ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 5, 2023
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