See also stories tagged with Venus
With the discovery of ever more exoplanets—over 6,000 now—scientists, of course, want to know if they are habitable for life. (At least, life as we know it.) But assessing habitability is a difficult task, as information ...
Plants lack nerves, yet they can sensitively detect touch from other organisms. In the Venus flytrap, highly sensitive sensory hairs act as tactile sensing organs; when touched twice in quick succession, they initiate the ...
Venus is often called Earth's "sister planet" because of their similarities in size, mass, and composition. Both are rocky worlds that formed about the same time in the inner solar system; however, despite these similarities, ...
An international study led by researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil has identified a little-known but potentially significant threat: Asteroids that share Venus's orbit and may completely escape current ...
On May 21, 2010, the Akatsuki orbiter ("Dawn" in Japanese) launched from the Tanegashima Space Center atop a H-IIA Launch Vehicle, establishing orbit around Venus in December 2015. In so doing, Akatsuki became the first interplanetary ...
A research team led by geophysicists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography provides an explanation for features that characterize the surface of the solar system's hottest planet.
In the search for habitable exoplanets, atmospheric conditions play a key role in determining if a planet can sustain liquid water. Suitable candidates often sit in the "Goldilocks zone," a distance that is neither too close ...
Every once in a while, you may look up toward the sun and see strange bright lights on either side of it. Or perhaps you'll be sitting in an aircraft, looking out the window at its shadow, and see a circle of light, like ...
A set of instruments shut off almost 50 years ago are still producing useful results. It's the seismometers left by the Apollo missions to monitor moonquakes, which, as the name suggests, are earthquakes but on the moon. ...
The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is on track for its gravity-assist flyby at Venus on 31 August, following the successful resolution of a spacecraft communication anomaly that temporarily severed ...
