Mercury doesn't give up its secrets easily. The smallest planet in our solar system is also one of the most extreme—a sun-scorched, metal-rich world with a puzzling magnetic field and lavas unlike anything found on Earth.
A lot can change in a year for Earth's forests and vegetation, as springtime and rainy seasons can bring new growth, while cooling temperatures and dry weather can bring a dieback of those green colors. And now, a novel type ...
The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets ...
The search for life beyond Earth is a key driver of modern astronomy and planetary science. The U.S. is building multiple major telescopes and planetary probes to advance this search. However, the signs of life—called biosignatures—that ...
Exoplanet science is shifting from finding any detectable exoplanets we can to searching for those in their stars' habitable zones. NASA's proposed Habitable World Observatory and other similar efforts are focused on these ...
Is frozen water scattered in systems around other stars? Astronomers have long expected it is, partially based on previous detections of its gaseous form, water vapor, and its presence in our own solar system.
We tend to think of habitability in terms of individual planets and their potential to host life. But barring outliers like rogue planets with internal heating or icy moons with subsurface oceans created by tidal heating, ...
In 2020, astronomers detected WD 1856+534 b, a gas giant that orbits a star 81 light-years from Earth. This exoplanet, which is roughly six times the mass of Jupiter (making it a "super-Jupiter"), was the first transiting ...
Comets that have hit Earth have been a mixed bag. Early in Earth's history, during the solar system's chaotic beginning, they were likely the source of our planet's water, ultimately making up about 0.02% of the planet's ...
The solar system consists of our star, the sun, and everything bound to it by gravity: the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, along with dwarf planets like Pluto, dozens of moons, and ...
