The Sun, planets, moons, comets, and asteroids—a close look at our cosmic neighborhood.
46 articles
The asteroid Vesta is roughly 530 km across, yet it's a craggy, irregular lump. Saturn's moon Mimas, at just 394 km, is nearly a perfect sphere. The line between round and lumpy isn't just about size — it also depends on whether a body is made of rock or ice. Once a body gets heavy enough, its own gravity sands down every bump until it settles into a sphere.
Venus is almost the same size and mass as Earth. Yet its surface sits at 467°C, hot enough to melt lead, under 93 times Earth's air pressure — like standing 900 meters deep in an ocean. The same raw materials, the same neighborhood, but a carbon dioxide atmosphere that never lets heat escape sent one twin down a very different path.
Saturn's north pole has worn the same hexagon for more than 40 years. At the opposite pole, Hubble has now caught a ten-sided 'decagon' taking shape — faint in 2023, unmistakable by 2025. Why the two poles of the same planet grow shapes with different numbers of sides is still an open question.
In July 2025, a telescope in Chile caught 3I/ATLAS tracing an open path around the Sun, one it will never repeat. Planets and ordinary comets always loop back, but this comet's open trajectory, not its appearance, is the hard evidence that it came from beyond our solar system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.