Over the course of nearly five months in 2022, NASA's Perseverance rover collected rock samples from Mars that could rewrite the history of water on the red planet and even contain evidence for past life on Mars.
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of exoplanets with extremely small orbits around their stars. But what about exoplanets that get close enough to be devoured by their star, and what if it's an Earth-sized exoplanet?
A seismic shift occurred in astronomy during the Scientific Revolution, beginning with 16th-century polymath Copernicus and his proposal that the Earth revolved around the sun. By the 17th century, famed engineer and astronomer ...
Modern astronomy would struggle without AI and machine learning (ML), which have become indispensable tools. They alone have the capability to manage and work with the vast amounts of data that modern telescopes generate. ...
Two of the planet's more pressing environmental stressors have the potential to alter the growth and reproductive output of plants found right along the world's coastlines, a new study suggests.
As global temperatures inch upwards year after year, the world's glaciers retreat. These rivers of ice and the even larger ice sheets which cover Greenland and Antarctica are melting—and the melt is speeding up.
In an exciting breakthrough for astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial life, a team of international scientists has announced the discovery of Gliese 12 b, a temperate, Earth-sized exoplanet just 40 light-years away—a ...
The launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2021 kicked off an exciting new era for exoplanet research, especially for scientists looking at terrestrial planets orbiting stars other than our sun. But three years ...
Mantle convection and associated plate tectonics of planets like the Earth are governed by the deformation of mantle rocks. This deformation occurs through the motion of defects in the crystal lattices of minerals. Thus, ...
A recent study in Nature Communications by scientists from China and Belgium suggests that Mercury's core-mantle boundary (CMB) includes a diamond layer, potentially up to 18 kilometers thick, deep within the planet's interior.
