Atmospheric circulation governs weather and climate, but it also carries angular momentum. When winds shift or mass redistributes, the atmosphere can exchange momentum with the solid Earth, slightly altering the planet's ...
This summer, exoplanet science—the study of planets orbiting stars beyond our sun—took a big step forward. Reports of helium gas escaping from the atmosphere of LHS 1140b propelled this exoplanet from the pages of scientific ...
Astrobiology
Sep 29, 2026
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43
In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can't have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged ...
Astrobiology
Sep 24, 2026
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101
Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have developed a way to unravel changing weather patterns on distant worlds. Using this approach, they discovered that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, SIMP 0136, previously ...
Space Exploration
Sep 16, 2026
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115
We usually think of auroras as beautiful lights in the night sky. I see them as visible traces of a connection between the sun, Earth's magnetic field and the atmosphere. This led me to an origin-of-life question: Could the ...
Stanford researchers have offered an explanation for why some sizzling, lava-covered worlds nestled tightly around their stars can retain their atmospheres. At such close quarters, intense stellar radiation should strip away ...
Astrobiology
Aug 26, 2026
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59
Antarctica is one of the driest, coldest places on Earth. Very little life survives its extremes. In the soils scattered around the frozen ice sheets, however, communities of microbes do survive. And one of the keys to their ...
Ecology
Aug 24, 2026
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13
Of Jupiter's four Galilean moons, Callisto is the one that gets the least attention. Io is constantly being resurfaced by volcanoes. Europa has a giant liquid water ocean. And Ganymede has its own magnetic field that interacts ...
Planetary Sciences
Aug 23, 2026
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63
The habitable zone concept is useful for understanding which worlds might, possibly, maybe, be habitable. It highlights exoplanets at the right distances from their stars for liquid water to potentially exist on their surfaces. ...
Astrobiology
Aug 11, 2026
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17
Prediction is the goal and test of all science, one might argue. Meteorologists have been curious about the inherent limits of weather forecasting ever since the dawn of numerical weather prediction in the late 1950s.
Earth Sciences
Aug 11, 2026
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