The surface of Mercury is filled with craters, ridges and steep cliffs. Over billions of years, as the planet's interior cooled, the planet also shrank. Just as the skin of a drying fruit wrinkles when what is inside it shrinks, ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 13, 2026
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An international team led by researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil has developed an innovative method to identify stars that have consumed the planets around them. The technique detects variations in ...
Astronomy
Sep 9, 2026
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The sun is the reason life exists on our small, blue planet. It provides solar radiation that warms the planet and ignites intricate biochemical processes like photosynthesis, producing oxygen for life to breathe. However, ...
Astronomy
Sep 15, 2026
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A 178-year-old mystery surrounding one of the earliest recorded examples of space weather affecting technology has been solved by an international team led by Lancaster University.
Planetary Sciences
Sep 16, 2026
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What happens to a space rock as it falls through Earth's atmosphere and becomes a meteorite? By studying 75 meteorite falls captured on video and in photographs, researchers identified seven distinct phases in the journey ...
Planetary Sciences
Aug 24, 2026
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Welcome back to our series on interstellar travel! In our first installment, we examined attempts to realize nuclear propulsion and how the technology could be used to reach the nearest star. In our second, we examined how ...
Astronomy
Aug 20, 2026
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Readers of a certain age will remember a golden era of asteroid films, capped by two with very different endings. "Deep Impact" drove home the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas ...
Astronomy
Aug 18, 2026
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30
Around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a giant ball of gas and dust. Over the next few million years, this "solar nebula" underwent a huge transformation, flattening into a disk of matter that ...
Planetary Sciences
Aug 24, 2026
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30
Venus appears pale yellow in visible light, but ultraviolet images reveal dramatic dark and bright patterns moving with the planet's upper sulfuric acid clouds. Scientists have known about these markings for roughly a century, ...
Astrobiology
Aug 27, 2026
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30
Launched on Oct. 20, 2018, the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has traveled for almost eight years, using a carefully planned but eventful sequence of planetary flybys and solar-electric propulsion to gradually approach ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 15, 2026
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