Close by the Sun is Mercury, a practically atmosphere-like world that has a lot of craters. Until NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft arrived there in 2008, we knew very little about the planet—only part of it had been imaged! ...
Space Exploration
Feb 20, 2015
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42
A comet called Atlas is currently heading toward the sun, and it just might put on a really good show in a couple of months. Discovered last December by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert system in Hawaii (thus the ...
The eight planets in our solar system each occupy their own orbits around the Sun. They orbit the star in ellipses, which means their distance to the sun varies depending on where they are in their orbits. When they get closest ...
Space Exploration
Apr 22, 2014
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5
Virtually every planet in the solar system has moons. Earth has the moon, Mars has Phobos and Deimos, and Jupiter and Saturn have 67 and 62 officially named moons, respectively. Heck, even the recently-demoted dwarf planet ...
Space Exploration
Jan 1, 2016
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43
Astronomers spying on a stellar system located dozens of lightyears from Earth have, for the first time, observed a troubling fireworks show: A star, named EK Draconis, ejected a massive burst of energy and charged particles ...
Astronomy
Dec 9, 2021
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Since the beginning of human history, people have understood that the sun is a central part of life as we know it. It's importance to countless mythological and cosmological systems across the globe is a testament to this. ...
Astronomy
May 10, 2016
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The solar system could be thrown into disaster when the sun dies if the mysterious 'Planet Nine' exists, according to research from the University of Warwick.
Astronomy
Aug 30, 2016
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Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, has published a Perspective piece in the journal Science suggesting that it is time for the space science community to take a closer ...
How did the Solar System's planets come to be? The leading theory is something known as the "protoplanet hypothesis", which essentially says that very small objects stuck to each other and grew bigger and bigger—big enough ...
Space Exploration
Jan 30, 2015
7
48
The visible surface of the sun, or the photosphere, is around 6,000°C. But a few thousand kilometers above it—a small distance when we consider the size of the sun—the solar atmosphere, also called the corona, is hundreds ...
Astronomy
May 25, 2021
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