Our solar system contains eight planets and more than 200 moons. The large majority of those moons have no chance of being habitable, but some of them—Europa and Enceladus, for example—are strong candidates in the search ...
Earth's moon is vitally important in making Earth the planet we know today: The moon controls the length of the day and ocean tides, which affect the biological cycles of lifeforms on our planet. The moon also contributes ...
The SETI Institute teamed up with Louisiana State University (LSU) and Mississippi State University (MSU) to help students design the science program for AstronetX PBC's first lunar-based camera (L-CAM 1). The scientific ...
Astronomers have reported a second, super-sized moon orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet beyond our solar system. If confirmed, the sighting could mean that exomoons are as common in the universe as exoplanets, and that big or ...
Finding an exact copy of the Earth somewhere in the universe sounds like a far-fetched notion, but scientists believe that because Earth happened in our solar system, something similar is bound to exist someplace else. University ...
The moons of planets that have no parent star can possess an atmosphere and retain liquid water. Astrophysicists at LMU have calculated that such systems could harbor sufficient water to make life possible—and sustain it.
So far, the search for extraterrestrial life has focused on planets at a distance from their star where liquid water is possible on the surface. But within our Solar System, most of the liquid water seems to be outside this ...
Numerical simulations show that the temperature gradient in the gas disk around a young gas giant planet could play a critical role in the development of a satellite system dominated by a single large moon, similar to Titan ...
What is the difference between a planet-satellite system as we have with the Earth and moon, versus a binary planet—two planets orbiting each other in a cosmic do-si-do?
For years, astronomers have looked up at the sky and speculated about the strange dimming behavior of Tabby's Star.
