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. 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 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 Within our solar system, Uranus is a geometric oddball. Its spin axis tilts more than 90° from its orbit, so it essentially rolls on its side through space. In contrast, Earth and other planets tilt only moderately or not at all. What's more, the ice giant's magnetic field is strangely offset and tilted another 60°. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-uranus-unusual-rotation-day.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:20:05 EDT news705316681 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 Mercury was long considered the exception to the rule that magnetic planets have radiation belts similar to Earth's Van Allen belts, but a new study by University of Michigan Engineering and the University of California, Berkeley, suggests otherwise—Mercury occasionally has such a layer of radiation in its magnetic field. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-mercury-reveals-short-belts-sun.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:40:06 EDT news704381641 Although general relativity (GR) is an elegant theory of gravity, we don't often need to use it. For most gravitational interactions, Newton's theory of universal gravitation works just fine. Newton's model is good enough to navigate spacecraft through the solar system and for most stars orbiting Sag A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-star-orbiting-galaxy-supermassive-black.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:40:02 EDT news703843190 Researchers in the U.S. have carried out the most stringent tests to date of the idea that an ultraviolet glow in the atmospheres of giant planets could partly arise through the indirect interaction between dark matter and ordinary matter. Led by Carlos Blanco at Penn State University and Rebecca Leane at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the team's results place some of the tightest constraints yet on the strength of this interaction. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-giant-planets-dark-detectors.html Astronomy Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:20:06 EDT news703496425 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 Life on Earth took a long evolutionary journey that eventually created us, the purportedly intelligent species that dominates the planet. But there was no grand plan or design, only happenstance, nature and luck. Life on Earth suffered multiple extinctions, but got up, dusted itself off and continued on its long march to complexity. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-gravitational-tides-earth-extinctions.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:00:01 EDT news701516829 Sending a spacecraft to the underexplored planet Uranus is at the top of many planetary scientists' wish lists. But which spacecraft-mounted instruments would be most useful for answering questions about the mysterious ice giant? https://phys.org/news/2026-06-energetic-neutral-atoms-uranus-odd.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:20:02 EDT news701014562 Have you ever been out at night and seen a streak of light blast across the sky and disappear? Ever wonder where that shooting star came from, or how it got to be in your sky? https://phys.org/news/2026-06-asteroid-comet-meteor-meteorite-streaking.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:40:05 EDT news700833900 Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is a unique environment in our solar system. It is the only moon (or body beyond Earth) to have a dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and its methane cycle is very similar to Earth's hydrological cycle, in which solid and liquid methane evaporate to form clouds and return to the surface as precipitation. In addition, its prebiotic surface environment and rich organic chemistry make it a prime destination for astrobiology missions, such as NASA's Dragonfly mission (set to launch no earlier than July 2028). https://phys.org/news/2026-06-titan-resources-potential.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:00:05 EDT news700739821 Our solar system has two ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, but there may have been a third. According to a new study published in the journal Icarus, this extra world might have triggered a violent planetary shuffling billions of years ago that could have disrupted some of Jupiter's and Uranus's moons and possibly led to the formation of others. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-planets-solar.html Astronomy Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:00:05 EDT news699524109 If you've ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you've probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a "cheat sheet" for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and a new paper in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific by Gabriel Steward and Matthew Hedman of the University of Idaho, attempts to do for the density and mass of all objects what the HR diagram did for the lifecycle of stars—provide a coherent, visual map to represent them. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-graph-universe.html Astronomy Tue, 12 May 2026 18:20:03 EDT news697810264 Researchers in the US and Germany have unveiled a theoretical blueprint for an atomic clock driven by a highly synchronized laser, where atoms work in concert rather than independently. Publishing their results in Physical Review Letters, Murray Holland at JILA, University of Colorado, including John Cooper and PhD student Jarrod Reilly, together with Simon Jäger at the University of Bonn revived an idea first proposed in the 1990s—possibly charting a course toward the narrowest-linewidth lasers ever achieved. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-physicists-revive-1990s-laser-concept.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:10:01 EDT news696156265 Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island are revealing new insight into the composition and origins of Uranus's two outer rings. Using data from the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA), combined with observations taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers constructed the first complete reflectance spectrum (sunlight reflected off the rings) of the μ and ν rings, confirming their colors and uncovering their detailed composition. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-uranus-outer-starkly.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:37:42 EDT news695572582 Planets, like those in our solar system, form in a bottom-up process where small bits of rock and ice clump together and grow larger over time. But the heftier the planet, the harder it is to explain its formation that way. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-webb-redefines-line-planets-stars.html Astronomy Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:40:06 EDT news695390761 The interiors of ice giant planets like Uranus and Neptune could be home to a previously unknown state of matter, according to new computational simulations by Carnegie's Cong Liu and Ronald Cohen. Their work, published in Nature Communications, predicts that a quasi-one-dimensional superionic state of carbon hydride exists under the extreme pressures and temperatures found deep inside these outer solar system bodies. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-depths-neptune-uranus-superionic.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:00:01 EDT news694435981 The ice giant Uranus is one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system, with its sideways rotation, intricate ring system, and unique family of moons. However, it is also one of the least explored objects in the solar system, owing to its extreme distance from the sun. With NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft remaining as the only spacecraft to visit Uranus, scientists continue to design and envision mission concepts for returning to explore Uranus and its icy secrets. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-uranus-mission-concept-casmius-probe.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:10:01 EDT news694175106 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 NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to capture new views of Saturn, revealing the planet in strikingly different ways. Observing in complementary wavelengths of light, the two space observatories provide scientists with a richer, more layered understanding of the gas giant's atmosphere. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-webb-hubble-comprehensive-view-saturn.html Astronomy Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:20:03 EDT news693674762 Six planets are linking up in the sky at the end of February, and most will be visible to the naked eye. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-planets-parade-night-sky-february.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:40:01 EST news691063575 New observations of Ganymede reveal a striking similarity between the auroras on the largest moon in the solar system and those on Earth. The international team of astrophysicists, led by researchers from the University of Liège, has produced new results indicating that, despite different conditions, the fundamental physical processes that generate auroras are common to different celestial bodies, and not just planets. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-auroras-ganymede-earth-similarities.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:20:01 EST news691073641 An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system that challenges long-standing theories of how planets form. Across our galaxy, astronomers routinely observe a characteristic pattern in planetary systems: rocky planets orbiting close to their host star with gas giants farther away. Our own solar system follows this rule, with the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, composed of rock and iron, and the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune being predominantly gaseous. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-cosmic-curveball-distant-planet-formation.html Planetary Sciences Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:10:01 EST news690214027 For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus's upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet. Using Webb's NIRSpec instrument, the team observed Uranus for nearly a full rotation, detecting the faint glow from molecules high above the clouds. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-webb-mysterious-upper-atmosphere-uranus.html Astronomy Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:22:56 EST news690729721 Through a combination of high-pressure experiments and optical spectroscopy, physicists have revealed new insights into the structural forms of solid methane. Led by Mengnan Wang at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, the team hopes their results, published in Physical Review Letters, could dispel long-standing confusion over where these different forms appear within methane's phase diagram—potentially deepening our understanding of planetary interiors. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-solid-methane.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:00:01 EST news689247706 Superionic water—the hot, black and strangely conductive form of ice that exists in the center of distant planets—was predicted in the 1980s and first recreated in a laboratory in 2018. With each closer look, it continues to surprise researchers. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-simultaneous-superionic-ice-giant-magnetic.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:50:03 EST news687105907 The moon and sun share top billing in 2026. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-moon-sun-figure-big-year.html Space Exploration Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:41:49 EST news686216460 Carl Sagan famously said that "We're all made of star stuff." But he didn't elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been created in massive supernovae explosions—hence the saying—and scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled: the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-stardust-star-ice.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:10:01 EST news685037989 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