It was a good year for space science as Sumner Starrfield, an astronomer at Arizona State University, described what was to appear as a huge star exploding in the night sky, in a once-in-a-lifetime event this past fall. A ...
While Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been a constant feature of the planet for centuries, University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered equally large spots at the planet's north and south poles that appear ...
When NASA's Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, it captured grainy photographs of large ice-covered moons. Now nearly 40 years later, NASA plans to send another spacecraft to Uranus, this time equipped to see if those icy moons ...
Diamond rain? Super-ionic water? These are just two proposals that planetary scientists have come up with for what lies beneath the thick, bluish, hydrogen-and-helium atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune, our solar system's ...
Ever since William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, astronomers have been eager to find new planets on the outer edge of the solar system. But after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, we've found no other large planets. ...
Uranus's upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades—and now scientists have shown why. Observations from Earth have shown Uranus' upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades, with no clear explanation.
Since May this year, the aurora borealis (northern lights), has at times been visible further south than usual over Britain, sparking amazement and fascination. Social media has been alive with images of the skies glowing ...
A Southwest Research Institute-led team combined compositional data of primitive bodies like Kuiper Belt objects, asteroids and comets with new solar data sets to develop a revised solar composition that potentially reconciles ...
Like the Earth, the sun likely has swirling polar vortices, according to new research led by the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR). But unlike on Earth, the formation and ...
When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it provided scientists' first—and, so far, only—close glimpse of this strange, sideways-rotating outer planet. Alongside the discovery of new moons and rings, baffling ...
