The Sun, planets, moons, comets, and asteroids—a close look at our cosmic neighborhood.
70 articles
For decades, scientists believed a hidden ocean lay beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Titan. A fresh look at old Cassini data by NASA/JPL researchers suggests otherwise: layers of ice and slush, with warm water pooling only near the core.
Deep inside Neptune's moon system, a crowd of small moons looks nothing like the giant Triton orbiting far outside. JWST infrared data shows they're darker and less icy than expected — the fingerprint of moons that were smashed apart and reassembled, twice over.
JWST and the Keck Observatory watched clouds swell and dissolve above Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It doesn't rain water there, it rains methane. Over roughly 30 hours, researchers tracked those clouds and confirmed that a world with real seasons and weather exists well beyond Earth.
Voyager 2 caught Neptune's faint rings up close in 1989, and they've barely been visible since. Now JWST, sitting roughly 2.8 billion miles away, has spotted them again in infrared — with Neptune itself fading into the dark and its rings and seven moons popping into view. SORABUMI explains how staying farther away actually helped.
Japan's MMX spacecraft is heading to Phobos, the tiny, misshapen moon of Mars, to scoop up 10 grams of sand and bring it home. Is Phobos a captured asteroid or debris from an ancient impact? SORABUMI explains how a handful of dust could finally settle the question.
Before humans return to the Moon, NASA is sending 17 uncrewed landers carrying more than 60 instruments — a roughly $2.6 billion reconnaissance effort. Why send machines dozens of times before people go even once? SORABUMI unpacks the long robotic run-up to a lunar base, from hunting for ice to proving landing accuracy to wiring up power and communications.
A spacewalk to swap out a single component on the ISS usually runs 5 to 8 hours. Before that, astronauts spend hours breathing pure oxygen to purge nitrogen from their bodies, and rack up roughly 7 hours of pool training for every hour they'll spend outside. SORABUMI walks through what 'fixing something' really means in orbit, starting from the prep work.
The Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but it's also about 400 times farther away, so the two appear almost exactly the same size in our sky. That's why the Moon can cover the Sun perfectly. And since the Moon drifts 3.8 cm farther from Earth every year, total eclipses won't last forever. SORABUMI unpacks the coincidence.
In September 2022, NASA's DART probe slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos and shortened its orbit by 32 minutes. Now ESA's Hera is closing in on the same rock in November 2026 to check the results. SORABUMI explains why planetary defense needs a two-step approach.
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the largest solar telescope on Earth, has resolved features as small as 30 km on the Sun's surface, 150 million km away. Texas-sized granules on a boiling face, magnetic threads just 20 km wide. SORABUMI explains how a ground-based instrument managed to see that clearly.
Launch the best telescope in the world today, and you still can't photograph Jupiter as it looked a decade ago. Hubble, working since 1990, caught something no new instrument ever could: the outer winds of the Great Red Spot speeding up by as much as 8% between 2009 and 2020. SORABUMI explains why a telescope's worth isn't measured by how new it is, but by how long it has been watching.
Water and oil don't mix. Like dissolves like. That's what chemistry class teaches us — but on Saturn's moon Titan, at roughly 94 kelvin (about -179°C), the rule breaks down. Benzene and ethane team up to form a 'cocrystal,' a mineral that doesn't exist anywhere on Earth.
JAXA's MMX mission launches in fiscal year 2026 to land on Phobos, Mars's larger moon, and scoop up soil samples. Is this 22-km-wide moon a captured asteroid or a chunk of Mars itself? Isotopes in the returned dust will settle the debate. SORABUMI explains humanity's first sample-return mission from the Mars system.
China's Chang'e-6 mission brought back 1.935 grams of sand from the Moon's far side, and it turned out to carry solar wind particles buried deeper than in near-side samples. Earth's magnetic field, it seems, was slowing the wind from 400 km/s to 200 km/s before it ever reached the near side. SORABUMI explains why the same Moon has two very different sunburn histories.
The impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago vaporized on contact — no fragment of it survives today. Yet nickel isotopes buried in a thin clay layer found across the globe reveal what it was: a rare carbon-rich 'CO chondrite,' born in the cold reaches beyond Jupiter. SORABUMI breaks down the science.
ESA's Comet Interceptor will launch before its target comet has even been discovered, parking in space to wait. A mothership and two probes will approach a comet that has never before neared the sun, or possibly an interstellar visitor, from multiple directions at once. SORABUMI explains this unusual mission.
SORABUMI explains the strange journey of BepiColombo, the Mercury probe that needs eight years and nine flybys to reach a planet right next door to Earth. The real challenge isn't distance — it's the Sun's gravity pulling the spacecraft in too fast.
Launched in 2004 at 600 km, NASA's Swift Observatory has sunk to about 400 km as atmospheric drag drags it down. Left alone, it would burn up on reentry by late 2026. Instead, a robotic servicer called LINK is being sent to grab it and push it back up — an unprecedented rescue. SORABUMI explains.
Earth has more than just the Moon tagging along. A small rock called Kamo'oalewa circles the Sun in almost the same year-long orbit, staying close without ever being caught by Earth's gravity. SORABUMI breaks down this strange, in-between relationship in everyday terms.
Instead of flying Mars samples straight to Earth, why not quarantine them on the Moon first? That's the proposal published in a scientific journal in June 2026. SORABUMI traces the idea back through Apollo's isolation protocols and Hayabusa's homecoming to explain why the Moon suddenly looks like the ideal front porch.
The closest photo of Japan's SLIM lander lying face-down on the Moon was taken by SORA-Q, an 80mm, 250-gram sphere built with transforming-toy technology from Takara Tomy. At roughly 1/4000th the weight of NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, why did such a small, simple design hold up so well in a brutal environment? SORABUMI explains.
In June 2026, scientists confirmed the first garnet ever found in a Martian rock, inside the meteorite NWA 8171. SORABUMI explains how a single crystal preserved a record of intense heat and pressure that no rover could ever reach.
On June 9, 2026, NASA announced the four astronauts of Artemis III. None of them will set foot on the lunar surface. Instead, they'll spend about two weeks circling Earth, testing dockings with landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX. The actual landing has been pushed to Artemis IV in 2028. Here's a look at the unglamorous reality behind spaceflight: sometimes you need a dress rehearsal before the real thing.
JWST detected methane and an unusually high abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The chemical ratios look nothing like those of comets born in our own solar system. This is the first time we have directly measured the composition of material made around another star.
In July 2026, China's Tianwen-2 probe will rendezvous with Kamo'oalewa — a 40–100 m rock that follows Earth around the Sun. Could it be a fragment blasted off the lunar surface, or just a regular space rock that happened to wander close? SORABUMI breaks it down.
Voyager and Cassini kept measuring different rotation rates for Saturn, and nobody could agree on why. Then JWST stared at the north pole for a full day and found the culprit: a self-sustaining atmospheric feedback loop powered by aurora. Here's how a 40-year mystery finally unraveled.
On the evening of June 9, 2026, Venus and Jupiter will close to within 1.5 degrees of each other in the western sky. They'll look like neighbors, but the actual gap between them is hundreds of millions of kilometers. Here's what a conjunction really is, and how to make the most of it.
In May 2026, NASA officially announced its plans to build a base at the lunar south pole. The goal has shifted from 'returning to the Moon' to 'staying there.' We break down the seven-year plan and what lunar living would actually require.
On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will pass just 32,000 km from Earth — closer than geostationary satellites. Up to 2 billion people could watch it move across the sky without a telescope. There's no collision risk, which is exactly why it's worth watching.
More than 130 small volcanoes have been confirmed clustered at the floor of Valles Marineris, Mars' massive canyon system. Evidence that magma and water once coexisted there makes it a compelling candidate in the search for ancient life. SORABUMI explains.
NASA's Juno spacecraft has captured detailed observations of Jovian lightning, confirming discharges with more than a million times the energy of Earth's. We look at 613 microwave pulses, the reason water behaves so differently in a hydrogen sky, and what the storm planet is still hiding.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 are shutting down instruments one by one as power dwindles by 4 watts every year. With only two science tools left, NASA is preparing a high-stakes maneuver called the 'Big Bang.'
SpaceX's Starship has reached its third generation. New Raptor 3 engines, fewer grid fins, and an integrated hot-stage ring. This isn't a minor update — it's a fundamental redesign built around mass production and full reusability.
A Japanese research team has pinpointed a massive solar storm that struck around 1200–1201 CE. The evidence comes from two sources: a sharp spike in carbon-14 trapped in the rings of a buried tree from northern Japan, and a line in the medieval diary of poet Fujiwara no Teika describing 'a red light in the northern sky.' An 800-year-old convergence — and a warning for today.
Why do comets shatter? This piece breaks down three mechanisms — tidal disruption, thermal explosion, and spin-up — and explores what the spectacular crash of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 revealed about our solar system.
How can a spacecraft speed up without burning a drop of fuel? Gravity assist — the trick that took Voyager to the edge of the solar system and is now sending NASA's Psyche spacecraft toward a metal asteroid — is one of the cleverest moves in the history of spaceflight. Here's how it actually works.
In May 2026, NASA's Psyche spacecraft flew past Mars and gained 4 km/s of speed without burning a drop of fuel. Here's how gravity assist works, why it matters, and the 50-year history behind this elegant trick of orbital mechanics.
China's Chang'e 7 launches in August 2026, heading for the lunar south pole on a mission to collect water ice directly. Here's why lunar water matters so much — from the strange physics of permanently shadowed craters to what it means for the future of space exploration.
Glaciers spread across Mars's mid-latitudes turned out to be more than 80% pure water ice, not rock. Here's what that means, and why it matters for crewed exploration.
Astronomers have detected a thin atmosphere around 2002 XV93, a trans-Neptunian object just ~500 km across — smaller than Pluto. We break down why such a tiny body can hold onto gas at all, and how stellar occultation makes the detection possible.
On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will skim past Earth at just 32,000 km — closer than geostationary satellites. During this once-in-10,000-year flyby, Earth's gravity will physically reshape the rock in real time. ESA and JAXA's Ramses mission will be there to document it.
In 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos and changed its orbit — the first time humanity had ever deflected a space rock. Now ESA's Hera mission is heading there to examine the aftermath. Here's how far planetary defense has come.
NASA's Juno spacecraft has remeasured Jupiter's shape, overturning figures that planetary scientists had relied on since the 1970s. The equatorial radius is about 8 km shorter than previously thought, the polar radius about 24 km shorter. That 'small' difference is now rippling through exoplanet research.
BepiColombo, the joint ESA–JAXA mission launched in 2018, will finally enter Mercury's orbit in November 2026. Why does the journey take so long, and what makes Mercury such a puzzling world?
SMILE, a spacecraft developed jointly by ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is set to launch on May 19, 2026. It will image — for the first time — the moment the solar wind slams into Earth's magnetosphere using X-rays, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of space weather.
Dark "holes" that appear on the Sun's surface from time to time — coronal holes — blast high-speed solar wind toward Earth, disrupting GPS, power grids, and satellite orbits. Here's how space weather works and why it matters.
Observations from Keck Observatory, JWST, and Hubble reveal that Uranus's two outermost rings have entirely different compositions — one shines blue with water ice, the other is reddish-brown with rock and organics. Why would rings around the same planet be so different?
The International Space Station is slated for retirement in the 2030s. What takes its place will be a new breed of orbital habitat — designed, built, and operated by private companies. Here's what the commercialization of low Earth orbit really means.
How did Earth, Mars, and Jupiter come to exist? Starting from clouds of gas and dust, this explainer walks through the step-by-step process of planet formation — and what the explosion of exoplanet discoveries has taught us about just how many ways a planetary system can turn out.
Every May, Earth plows through a trail of debris left by Halley's Comet. Here's why the Eta Aquariid meteor shower puts on a bigger show in the Southern Hemisphere — and exactly what's happening when those streaks light up the predawn sky.
In spring 2026, a comet returned to the inner solar system and became faintly visible to the naked eye. Its last visit was 180,000 years ago, and it won't come back. Why do comets captivate us the way they do? Here's a look at how to observe one, and what these ancient wanderers actually are.
Uranus and Neptune are called 'ice giants,' but their interiors may host something stranger than ice: a superionic state where carbon stays locked in place while hydrogen alone flows in helical paths. This bizarre behavior could finally explain the planets' wildly tilted magnetic fields.
In March 2025, ESA and JAXA announced deeper cooperation on Moon and Mars exploration. But 48 countries don't converge on the Moon just for the sake of peace. Cost, technology, and politics are the real drivers — here's how they actually work.
NASA's Curiosity rover detected 21 organic molecules in a Martian rock — 7 of them never seen on Mars before. This isn't evidence of life. But the rock preserved a chemistry friendly to life for 3.5 billion years.
Multiple Mars spacecraft recorded the same solar storm simultaneously. Without a magnetosphere, Mars receives radiation doses many times higher than Earth. Here's why that's the biggest obstacle to sending humans there.
Every time ions streaming from the Sun collide with hydrogen atoms in space, they produce X-rays. The eROSITA telescope has, for the first time, successfully separated the solar system's own glow from deep-space signals. Here's how it works and why it matters.
A shelf-like landform in Mars's northern hemisphere may be the strongest evidence yet that a vast ocean once covered a third of the planet. Where did all that water go — and what does it mean for the search for life?
That long glowing streak crossing the night sky isn't just one tail — it's two. A white, curving dust tail and a blue, razor-straight ion tail, shaped by completely different forces. Here's what's actually going on.
Tucked into an orbit that is neither the lunar surface nor Earth's backyard, Gateway is one of the stranger ideas in the Artemis program. Why build a small station out there at all? Here's a plain-language look at the NRHO, how Gateway differs from the ISS, and why it matters for reaching Mars.
JWST, SOHO, Euclid — they all live at something called a Lagrange point, a gravitationally sweet spot 1.5 million km from Earth. Why send expensive telescopes all the way out there? Here's how the solar system's cosmic parking lots actually work.
SpaceX's Starship launches, returns nearly intact, and flies again. What makes this so hard, and why does it matter so much? With the second-generation Block 3 vehicle now approaching its debut, here's a clear-eyed look at the engineering and the stakes.
Nearly 30,000 tracked objects now circle Earth. When broken satellites and rocket stages collide, fragments breed more fragments in a chain reaction that could make entire orbital bands permanently unusable. Here's what Kessler syndrome actually means — and which altitudes are already in danger.
Jupiter boasts four Galilean moons while Saturn's only large moon is Titan. A study published in April 2026 traced that striking difference to the planets' magnetic fields — an invisible barrier that determined which moons lived and which ones fell.
Saturn's rings are arguably the most iconic sight in the solar system — and they're slowly falling onto the planet itself. NASA observations have revealed the phenomenon known as 'ring rain,' and the rings may be gone within 100 million years.
As the Artemis program pushes forward, long-term stays on the lunar surface are becoming a real possibility. Radiation, vacuum, and wild temperature swings — here's what the science says about keeping humans alive in one of the most hostile environments imaginable.
For the first time in half a century, people flew to the vicinity of the Moon. Robots could have taken the same photos. So why send a crew? Artemis II's 10-day mission and its 7-hour lunar observation window force that question into sharp focus.
The near side of the Moon is draped in dark volcanic plains, while the far side is a battered mess of craters. That stark asymmetry traces directly back to the Moon's violent birth. Here's what Artemis II astronauts saw when they became the first humans in over 50 years to lay eyes on it.
The James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope observed Saturn at nearly the same time. What infrared and visible light each uncovered tells us something profound about how planets are built.
Using the naming of asteroid 'Torifune' as a starting point, we dig into what it means to give a name to a rock in space — IAU naming rules, the intersection of Japanese mythology and outer space, and the planetary defense mission driving Hayabusa2 forward.
Discovered in 2025, 3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object ever detected. How do we know it came from outside the solar system? What makes it different from ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov? And why did ESA and NASA scramble to observe it so quickly? Here's what the data is telling us — and what it might unlock about planet formation across the galaxy.