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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
