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. Using advanced new simulations, a team of astronomers in the U.S. has developed a promising new theory for how giant, gaseous exoplanets migrate into stiflingly close orbits around their host stars. Led by J. J. Zanazzi at The Pennsylvania State University, the team showed how both massive "hot Jupiters" and smaller, Neptune-sized planets could migrate from distant, elliptical orbits as they release energy via dramatic shock waves in their outer atmospheres. Their results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-supersonic-strange-orbits-hot-jupiters.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:20:06 EDT news712412094 Scientists may add a new dwarf planet to the official roster of our solar system. The distant, icy body, provisionally dubbed 2026 ED138, orbits our system beyond Pluto. It was spotted earlier this month by a scientist combing through data from the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-rubin-observatory-reveals-dwarf-planet.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 27 Oct 2026 18:30:05 EDT news712338601 A Southwest Research Institute–led study used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to examine ice grains streaming from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, just the third object from beyond our solar system ever identified. The observations point to tiny aggregates of water ice and dust, about a micron or smaller. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-webb-links-interstellar-comet-3iatlas.html Astronomy Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:00:13 EDT news712310882 Water isn't always as it seems. Under extreme conditions, such as those found on other planets, it has been discovered to change its atomic structure, giving it the means to alter its appearance and other properties. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-weve-physicists-earth-conditions.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:10:02 EDT news711729662 By indirectly probing the depths of Uranus and Neptune's atmospheres, an international team of scientists has revealed a significant contrast in their chemical composition. Neptune appears to be more enriched in oxygen than Uranus. These results suggest that the two ice giants may have formed in different regions of the primitive solar system before reaching their current orbits, calling into question the idea of a common origin for these two planets, often considered twins. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-planetary-twins-uranus-neptune-stories.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:40:06 EDT news711646141 The fate of our solar system is written in the stars—well, one star to be precise: the sun. Estimates of what the end will look like once the sun sheds much of its mass and ultimately dies vary widely. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the final curtain for some of the outer planets will arrive much sooner than previously thought, shrinking the timeline from a quintillion years down to roughly 1 billion years. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-dying-sun-solar-sooner-thought.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:20:06 EDT news711029532 The only known supernova remnant of its kind in the Milky Way has an unexpectedly intricate structure: chains of gas knots resembling pearls on a string, each wide enough to fit the solar system multiple times. Using the Gemini North telescope, an international team co-led by Ilaria Caiazzo, assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), captured the most detailed view yet of Pa 30, revealing striking new features of the remnant associated with a historical supernova witnessed nearly 850 years ago. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-images-unique-supernova-remnant-reveal.html Astronomy Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:00:18 EDT news710494434 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 journals into the mainstream media. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-alien-life-possibility-exoplanet-lhs.html Astrobiology Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:20:02 EDT news709919582 In recent decades, astronomers have reconstructed a fairly complete scenario for planet formation, from minute dust motes clumping together to the emergence of rocky spheres thousands of kilometers across, like Earth, or larger gas giants like Jupiter. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-astronomers-capture-unprecedented-view-gas.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:20:10 EDT news709460400 A star and its planets form when a cloud of gas and dust collapses in on itself somewhere in space. The cloud then forms a disk around the nascent star, within which the planets will form. This protostar and its disk then rotate in the same direction. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-rebellious-exoplanet-orbits-star.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:00:01 EDT news709205883 Many of the moons orbiting Saturn, Uranus and Neptune likely conceal oceans of liquid water beneath miles of icy shell. Because life as we know it needs water, these buried oceans rank among the most promising places to search for life beyond Earth. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-scientists-simulate-cosmic-icy-moons.html Astrobiology Sat, 19 Sep 2026 07:00:06 EDT news708960640 Nanodiamonds are tiny diamond particles that usually measure mere millionths of a millimeter. They are extremely hard, stable and heat-resistant and highly adaptable for various purposes in medicine, new materials, catalysis and energy technology. By compressing plastic with lasers, researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Rostock are now able to systematically produce high-purity, ultra-small diamonds with a narrow size distribution. This is impossible to achieve with conventional methods such as explosions. As a scalable technology, laser compression offers great potential for improved, clean and sustainable production of ultra-small nanodiamonds. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-laser-plastic-ultra-small-high.html Nanophysics Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:40:06 EDT news708870182 Scientists have discovered that there is ice deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus and want to find out what form it takes and how it behaves. They cannot dig for it and transport it all the way back to Earth, so they do the next best thing: recreate those extreme conditions in the lab. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-scientists-strange-ice-interiors-neptune.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:40:08 EDT news708352479 Until just over a decade ago, ring systems were thought to be exclusive to the giant planets of the solar system, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, in 2013, a small body barely 250 kilometers (155 miles) in diameter, located at nearly 17 times the Earth–sun distance, joined this small group. The object is Chariklo, a small body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, around which astronomers discovered two dense rings. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-jwst-chariklo-invisible.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:00:04 EDT news708089366 For the first time, scientists used the combined power of NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Some are the smallest and faintest ever directly seen. The researchers unexpectedly found fewer small TNOs than expected and that the colors of these bodies followed the same relationships as those of their larger family members. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-hubble-webb-solar.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:05:13 EDT news708087880 More than 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from Earth, an ancient icy object is slowly awakening. As it drifts inward through the solar system, the frozen body known as Centaur 450P/LONEOS has begun releasing gas and dust—behavior more commonly associated with comets than with centaurs, the small icy objects that typically orbit between Jupiter and Neptune. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-saturn-encounter-distant-centaur-path.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:00:04 EDT news707499541 Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn't happen on Earth or even in Jupiter's Great Red Spot—it happens in the interiors of ice giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressures and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside these planets. For the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates this phenomenon. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-scientists-diamond-secret-ice-giants.html Planetary Sciences Sat, 29 Aug 2026 20:30:04 EDT news707038082 Welcome back to our series on interstellar travel! In our first installment, we examined attempts to realize nuclear propulsion and how the technology could be used to reach the nearest star. In our second, we examined how fusion power has also been considered a means of propelling spacecraft to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). In both cases, these proposals paralleled Cold War developments in rocketry and nuclear armaments, as they did for most space age advancements. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-interstellar-iv-solar-magnetic-energy.html Astronomy Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:20:09 EDT news706437782 It's nearly 170 million years old. It's more than 2.5 times the size of Earth. And it's the first exoplanet discovered and cataloged by researchers with the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research (WiCOR). https://phys.org/news/2026-08-mega-earth-gj-523b-massive.html Astronomy Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:40:04 EDT news706181881 Neptune's moon and ring system stand out among the giant planets because of the strange imbalance between its one very large moon and its many tiny moons. Its largest moon, Triton, makes up more than 99% of the mass of all satellites orbiting the planet while orbiting retrograde compared with Neptune's rotation. The predominant theory is that Triton is a captured Kuiper Belt object that caused a major disruption in Neptune's early moon system. Now, a new study published in Science Advances provides spectroscopic evidence to support this theory. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-neptune-tiny-moons-story-triton.html Planetary Sciences Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:20:01 EDT news704628891 Diamond is more than a dazzling gem—the extremely hard form of carbon makes up the pellet that encases fuel for inertial confinement fusion, and scientists believe it rains down deep inside ice giant planets like Neptune and Uranus. In both cases, the material experiences enormous pressures. Until now, experiments and simulations have disagreed about how it actually behaves under those conditions. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-diamond-triple-fusion-gain-secrets.html General Physics Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:40:05 EDT news705836281 A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) provides evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto's surface through cracks at the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet's surface. This is the first evidence of liquid flow occurring recently on Pluto. The study is based on data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft and led by SwRI Associate Vice President Dr. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-liquid-nitrogen-pluto-heart-glacier.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:00:05 EDT news705225241 Inspired by naturally occurring mats and balls of seaweed, researchers have created highly porous, superadhesive meshes capable of capturing both large and small microplastic particles—a longstanding challenge in the field. The mesh can clean microplastics from both saltwater and freshwater and is made from sustainable, widely available biopolymers. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-tangled-seaweed-size-cleaners-ocean.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:00:11 EDT news705069181 In 1989, the Voyager 2 mission discovered six new moons orbiting Neptune, including five tiny ones that orbit just outside the planet's main rings. Because of their small sizes and locations, these satellites have been difficult to study from Earth. Now, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of Caltech researchers has observed Neptune's rings and three of those moons—Larissa, Galatea and Proteus—and found that their composition is unique among outer solar system bodies. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-neptune-moons-shattered-ancient-icy.html Space Exploration Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:00:06 EDT news704623381 The planets that appear most common in the universe could have a lot of water—but it could be hiding where telescopes can't detect it, according to a new study led by scientists with the University of Chicago. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-distant-exoplanets-webb-telescope.html Astronomy Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:00:01 EDT news703166987 Sub-Neptunes are the most common type of planet in our galaxy. Bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, these worlds remain deeply mysterious because scientists still do not know what they are made of. What astronomers really want to figure out is their interior composition. They could be rocky planets wrapped in hydrogen-rich atmospheres, or they could be volatile-rich worlds loaded with water or carbon-bearing molecules. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-astronomers-reveal-clouds-hidden-interiors.html Astronomy Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:00:03 EDT news702888098 Exoplanet atmospheres have become prime targets for astrobiologists in the search for life beyond Earth. This is because exoplanet surfaces can't be directly imaged yet, so astronomers must get creative in how they search for signs of life, also called biosignatures. Presently, powerful ground- and space-based telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are improving in their ability to observe and analyze exoplanet atmospheres. But how did these atmospheres form and evolve, and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth? https://phys.org/news/2026-07-nautilus-array-track-exoplanet-atmospheres.html Space Exploration Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:20:01 EDT news702117027 Within their planetary systems, stars are continuously shaping their orbiting planets through gravity, radiation and magnetic forces. So far, this relationship has appeared to be a one-way street. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-giant-exoplanet-magnetic-host-star.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:40:01 EDT news701696940 Uranus and Neptune remain two of the most mysterious objects in the solar system, primarily because they have been visited only by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Their "ice giant" moniker comes from longstanding hypotheses that their interiors are comprised of an icy mantle beneath their hydrogen-helium atmospheres. While Jupiter and Saturn are also composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, Uranus and Neptune are hypothesized to have a layered structure composed of icy elements in their interiors. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-uranus-neptune-magma-worlds-ice.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:20:01 EDT news701682242 A debate has been raging among planetary scientists for more than a decade—why are there so few exoplanets with a radius of about 1.8 times that of Earth? Exoplanets are currently largely grouped into two distinct categories—"super-Earths" are below that size and have rocky interiors, whereas "sub-Neptunes" are above that size limit and appear puffier. But researchers don't really understand why the path of planetary evolution forces this bifurcation. A new mission proposal, called the Early eVolution Explorer (EVE), wants to find out, and a draft of its concept can be found in preprint form on arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-nasa-early-evolution-explorer-mission.html Planetary Sciences Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:30:03 EDT news700318541