Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers led by the University of Maryland identified water, methane and ammonia in the atmosphere of HATS-6 b, a giant planet 500 light-years from Earth. The observations ...
Astronomy
Sep 25, 2026
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148
When the universe was still in its infancy—only 500 million years after the Big Bang, or about 3% of its current age—some of the universe's earliest stars and galaxies had already formed. Astronomers have long predicted that ...
Astrobiology
Sep 24, 2026
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361
Like tendrils on a vine, lava spreads out from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on the Pacific coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. On July 30, 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck in the nearby ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 24, 2026
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250
In recent decades, astronomers have reconstructed a fairly complete scenario for planet formation, from minute dust motes clumping together to the emergence of rocky spheres thousands of kilometers across, like Earth, or ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 24, 2026
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132
In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can't have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged ...
Astrobiology
Sep 24, 2026
1
102
Unlike Earth, the moon no longer has a core-generated magnetic field. On our planet, the movement of liquid iron in the outer core generates a global magnetic field. This so-called geodynamo works on a similar principle to ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 23, 2026
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73
Conditions on early Earth may have become stable enough to sustain the chemistry associated with the origins of life around 4.33 billion years ago, according to new research co-led by Planetary Science Institute senior scientist ...
Astrobiology
Sep 23, 2026
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77
The asteroid Bennu orbits the sun once every 1.2 years and approaches Earth every six years, passing within around 300,000 kilometers. NASA took advantage of this to collect material from the celestial body. In a spectacular ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 23, 2026
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64
Studying exoplanets has given astronomers insights into the characteristics that could help them find life beyond Earth. For years, astronomers thought an exoplanet's location in a star's habitable zone was enough to make ...
Astronomy
Sep 23, 2026
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41
Asteroids don't come with a warning label that they might one day hit Earth. While we don't know of any currently on course to do so, we are finding thousands of new ones each year, and there's always a chance that one could.
Planetary Sciences
Sep 23, 2026
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