Despite surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead, lava-spewing volcanoes, and puffy clouds of sulfuric acid, uninhabitable Venus offers vital lessons about the potential for life on other planets, a new paper argues.
A fleeting visit of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Venus has revealed surprising insights into how gases are stripped away from the upper layers of the planet's atmosphere.
There's a lot we don't know about the planet nearest to us. Venus is shrouded in clouds, making speculation about what's happening on its surface a parlor game for many planetary scientists for decades. But one idea that ...
Life on Earth depends on six critical elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. These elements are referred to as CHNOPS, and along with several trace micronutrients and liquid water, they're ...
Our solar system and everything within it—including the Earth—will look very different when the sun dies.
After beholding the midday darkness of a total solar eclipse that raced across the continent, thousands of spectators in New England were stuck seeing only brake lights Monday night as highway traffic backed up for hours.
A chilly, midday darkness fell across North America on Monday as a total solar eclipse raced across the continent, thrilling those lucky enough to behold the spectacle through clear skies.
While the upcoming total solar eclipse is a special moment to reflect on our place in the universe, scientists have been studying the birth of the sun and the formation of our solar system for a long time.
If you've ever been taught about how Earth orbits around the sun, you might well think our planet travels along an oval-shaped path that brings it much closer to the sun at some times of the year than at others. You'd have ...
Potential signs of the rainbow-like "glory effect" have been detected on a planet outside our solar system. Glory are colorful concentric rings of light that occur only under peculiar conditions.
