Universe Today has examined the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, and planetary atmospheres, and how these intriguing scientific disciplines can help ...
In 2008, astronomers with the SuperWASP survey spotted WASP-12b as it transited in front of its star. At the time, it was part of a new class of exoplanets ("hot Jupiters") discovered a little more than a decade before. However, ...
In 1999, Michelle Nichols saw her first total solar eclipse on a cruise in the Black Sea. It would be many years before she witnessed another one during a visit to southern Illinois in 2017.
The search for life beyond Earth fascinates many and inspires big questions: Are we truly alone in the universe? Is our Earth unique? Is it possible that life beyond Earth may actually be far from little green aliens and ...
Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances—in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to orbit their suns have no ...
In several billion years, our sun will become a white dwarf. What will happen to Jupiter and Saturn when the sun transitions to become a stellar remnant? Life could go on, though the giant planets will likely drift further ...
It is difficult to emphasize the significance of the milestone surpassed by Nasa's Mars helicopter, Ingenuity.
Universe Today has examined the potential for sending humans to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, the planet Venus, and Saturn's largest moon, Titan, all despite their respective harsh environments and vast distances. These conversations ...
Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers' best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather than the presence, of a chemical ...
The way astronomers study planets in our own solar system is surprisingly similar to the way they study exoplanets, despite the latter being orders of magnitude more distant. The key is spectroscopy—examining the wavelengths ...
