Content tagged "solar system".
16 items (16 articles, 0 stories)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Researchers melted 300 kilograms of Antarctic ice core spanning 80,000 years and found iron-60 — a radioactive element that can only be born in a supernova explosion. It turns out the region of space the solar system is currently passing through is the remnant of a star that once exploded.
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.
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.
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 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.