https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Neptune's far-flung moon Nereid may be the last of the planet's original companions that managed to survive a cosmic crash, scientists reported Wednesday. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-neptune-mysterious-moon-nereid-survivor.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 20 May 2026 15:55:54 EDT news698511286 Neptune is the solar system's most distant planet, a cold, blue ice giant sitting nearly 30 times further from the sun than Earth. At that remote distance, temperatures plunge to nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and a single year lasts 165 Earth years. Yet despite its isolation, Neptune is a world whipped by the fastest winds in the solar system and home to one of its most bizarre moons. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-moon-planet.html Planetary Sciences Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:00:03 EDT news693745910 Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that the spinning of a small comet slowed and then reversed its direction of rotation, offering a dramatic example of how volatile activity can affect the spin and physical evolution of small bodies in the solar system. This is the first time researchers have observed evidence of a comet reversing its spin. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-hubble-reversal-tiny-comet.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:20:02 EDT news693746521 The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has started releasing its first discoveries: including supernovae, variable stars and asteroids, which will from now on be discovered at an astonishing rate as it begins its Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a ten-year survey probing the deepest reaches of the universe. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-world-biggest-astronomy-camera-universe.html Astronomy Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:00:07 EST news691775101 It's been about eight months since the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) saw first light. Now the telescope is scanning the night sky to detect transient changes and sending alerts to astronomers and observatories around the world so they can perform follow-up observations. This alert system is one of the last milestones before the VRO starts its primary endeavor: the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). https://phys.org/news/2026-03-ready-rubin-observatory-deluge-discoveries.html Astronomy Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:50:02 EST news691678141 There have been plenty of attempts to resolve the "Hubble Tension" in cosmology. This feature describes how one of the most important variables in cosmology, the expansion of the universe, takes on different values depending on how you measure it. A new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I report on the Cosmic Positioning System (CPS) details another potential solution to it—this one involving a network of five far-flung satellites spread throughout the solar system. The paper is posted to the arXiv preprint server. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-cosmic-positioning-outer-solar.html Astronomy Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:30:01 EST news691150936 For the first time, a much younger version of the sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy by astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The bubble—called an "astrosphere"—completely surrounds the juvenile star. Winds from the star's surface are blowing up the bubble and filling it with hot gas as it expands into much cooler galactic gas and dust surrounding the star. The sun has a similar bubble around it, which scientists call the heliosphere, created by the solar wind. It extends far beyond the planets in our solar system and protects Earth from damaging particles from interstellar space. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-young-sun-caught-chandra.html Astronomy Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:40:09 EST news691081751 Astronomers have long debated why so many icy objects in the outer solar system look like snowmen. Michigan State University researchers now have evidence of the surprisingly simple process that could be responsible for their creation. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-space-snowmen-gravitational-collapse-contact.html Astronomy Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:00:15 EST news690567661 Astronomers have long sought evidence to explain why comets at the outskirts of our own solar system contain crystalline silicates, since crystals require intense heat to form and these "dirty snowballs" spend most of their time in the ultracold Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Now, looking outside our solar system, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has returned the first conclusive evidence that links how those conditions are possible. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-webb-young-sun-star-forging.html Astronomy Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:55:41 EST news688229701 Astronomers have, for the first time, captured a detailed snapshot of planetary systems in an era long shrouded in mystery. The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS), using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has produced the sharpest images ever of 24 debris disks, the dusty belts left after planets finish forming. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-alma-reveals-teenage-years-worlds.html Astronomy Tue, 20 Jan 2026 02:00:01 EST news688046158 Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed circling a young star. For the first time in visible light, Hubble has revealed the disk is unexpectedly chaotic and turbulent, with wisps of material stretching much farther above and below the disk than astronomers have seen in any similar system. Strangely, more extended filaments are only visible on one side of the disk. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-chaotic-dracula-chivito-hubble-reveals.html Astronomy Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:30:01 EST news685629586 The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. Exactly what triggered this chaos remains uncertain, but researchers at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute now propose a close encounter with a wandering substellar object during the sun's youth. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-rogue-planet-reshape-solar.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:04:25 EST news685019042 Observations with the instrument SPHERE at ESO's Very Large Telescope have produced an unprecedented gallery of "debris disks" in exoplanetary systems. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-debris-disk-gallery-tale-asteroids.html Astronomy Wed, 03 Dec 2025 03:00:02 EST news683911862 A vast region of our solar system, called the Kuiper belt, stretches from the orbit of Neptune out to 50 or so astronomical units (AU), where an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun. This region consists mostly of icy objects and small rocky bodies, like Pluto. Scientists believe Kuiper belt objects (KPOs) are remnants left over from the formation of the solar system. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-potentially-distinct-kuiper-belt-clustering.html Astronomy Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:00:05 EST news682951980 In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of the "universal constructor." The theory was further detailed in the 1966 book, "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata," a collection of von Neumann's writings compiled and completed by a colleague after his death. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-replicating-probes-solar.html Space Exploration Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:56:06 EST news681551762 An international team of astronomers have employed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a nearby M-dwarf star known as TWA 20. As a result, they detected a large debris disk around this star. The finding was reported in a paper published October 23 on the arXiv pre-print server. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-jwst-large-debris-disk-nearby.html Astronomy Tue, 28 Oct 2025 09:00:03 EDT news680860723 University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being consumed by a white dwarf star outside our solar system. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-icy-planetesimal-high-nitrogen-content.html Astrobiology Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:30:01 EDT news677752155 In our nearby stellar neighborhood, a burned-out star is snacking on a fragment of a Pluto-like object. With its unique ultraviolet capability, only NASA's Hubble Space Telescope could identify that this meal is taking place. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-hubble-white-dwarf-piece-pluto.html Astronomy Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:06:03 EDT news677415961 Astronomers have discovered what they think may be another moon orbiting a distant dwarf planet called Quaoar. This small, icy, egg-shaped planet in the far reaches of our solar system, beyond Neptune, is already known to have two rings and a moon, but this discovery was unexpected and accidental. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-discovery-moon-orbiting-mysterious-distant.html Astronomy Thu, 11 Sep 2025 10:20:05 EDT news676804630 Asteroid Bennu—the target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, led by the University of Arizona—is a mixture of materials from throughout, and even beyond, our solar system. Over the past few billion years, its unique and varied contents have been transformed by interactions with water and the harsh space environment. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-asteroid-bennu-capsule-materials-witness.html Astronomy Fri, 22 Aug 2025 10:38:04 EDT news675077881 Is there a massive undiscovered planet on the outer reaches of the solar system? The idea has been around since before the discovery of Pluto in the 1930s. Labeled as planet X, prominent astronomers had put it forward as an explanation for Uranus's orbit, which drifts from the path of orbital motion that physics would expect it to follow. The gravitational pull of an undiscovered planet, several times larger than Earth, was seen as a possible reason for the discrepancy. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-planet-massive-edge-solar.html Astronomy Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:30:01 EDT news673020970 Sometimes, in order to support an idea, you first have to discredit alternative, competing ideas that could take resources away from the one you care about. In the scientific community, one of the most devastating ways you can do that is by making the other methods appear to be too expensive to be feasible, or, better yet, prove they wouldn't work at all due to some fundamental limitation. That is what a recent paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev, the world's most prominent proponent of a solar gravitational lens (SGL) telescope mission, does. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-solar-gravitational-lens-telescope-feasible.html Astronomy Mon, 14 Jul 2025 14:20:49 EDT news671721644 As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of more than 5.5 billion miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-horizons-successful-deep-space-stellar.html Astronomy Fri, 04 Jul 2025 07:40:01 EDT news670827565 What processes during the formation of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, potentially led to it having cryovolcanism, and even an internal ocean? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the formation and evolution of Charon to ascertain whether it once possessed an internal ocean during its history and if this could have led to cryovolcanism based on images obtained by NASA's New Horizons probe. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-cryovolcanism-resurfacing-pluto-largest-moon.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 27 Jun 2025 11:26:52 EDT news670242410 For years, astronomers have been searching for a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the dark outer reaches of our solar system. Now, a team of researchers have taken a completely different approach to this cosmic detective story—instead of looking for reflected sunlight, they're hunting for the planet's own heat signature. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-solar-greatest-mystery.html Astronomy Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:30:04 EDT news669630601 President Donald Trump's NASA budget plans look to cut its public relations funding by half, but already the agency is shuttering social media accounts that include those dedicated to popular missions, including Mars Curiosity, Mars Perseverance and Voyager. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-nasa-popular-social-accounts-mars.html Space Exploration Mon, 16 Jun 2025 09:10:02 EDT news669283289 A group of astronomers from across the globe, including a team from the University of Washington and led by Queen's University Belfast, have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects will be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later in 2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-rubin-observatory-millions-solar-vivid.html Astronomy Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:29:18 EDT news668251752 For centuries, astronomers have sought to understand the formation and evolution of the solar system and the dynamics that govern it. In particular, there is the long-standing question of whether or not the planets' orbits will remain stable over time. However, these studies have generally treated the solar system as an isolated system, focusing solely on the gravitational interactions between the planets. This is in spite of the fact that astronomers have known for some time that stars in the Milky Way make close passes to each other every so often. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-stars-significant-impact-future-solar.html Astronomy Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:24:04 EDT news668096642 How can fission-powered propulsion help advance deep space exploration, specifically to the outer planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from India investigated the financial, logistical, and reliability of using fission power for future deep space missions. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and future astronauts develop next-generation technologies as humanity continues to expand its presence in space. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-advancing-deep-space-nuclear-propulsion.html Space Exploration Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:55:44 EDT news668084139 Asteroids are the ancient remnants of our solar system's birth, rocky fragments that never formed into planets. Most of these celestial wanderers inhabit the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where Jupiter's immense gravitational influence prevents them from assembling into a single world. Ranging from house-sized boulders to Ceres, a dwarf planet nearly 1,000 kilometers across, asteroids preserve pristine records of the early solar system's composition and conditions. https://phys.org/news/2025-05-china-tianwen-asteroid-sample.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 29 May 2025 10:30:05 EDT news667732622