Tag Archives: planets

With one riddle solved, the team focused on another: how those lumps got there. Turning back the clock, they concluded that the lumps likely arrived as giant asteroids or other rocky material that struck Mars during the early solar system, generating those oceans of magma as they drove deep into the mantle, bringing with them fragments of crust and mantle. …

Rocky material that impacted Mars lies scattered in giant lumps throughout the planet’s mantle, offering clues about Mars’ interior and its ancient past. What appear to be fragments from the aftermath of massive impacts on Mars that occurred 4.5 billion years ago have been detected deep below the planet’s surface. The discovery was made thanks to NASA’s now-retired InSight lander, …

The origin of the differing tilts in the orbits of the planets in our solar system may have been revealed through the discovery of subtle warps spotted in many planet-forming disks around young stars. A major observing program with ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), called exoALMA, has surveyed 15 planet-forming, or protoplanetary, disks in detail. In particular, astronomers led by …

New research suggests that dark matter could gather over vast periods of time at the heart of Jupiter-sized planets, creating black holes that eat these worlds from within. This striking concept may mean extrasolar planets, or “exoplanets,” could be used to study the mystery of dark matter. In this new model, superheavy dark matter particles could be trapped by exoplanets, …

Exoplanets might hold hidden clues about dark matter. New research suggests these distant worlds could even collapse into black holes, challenging existing theories. Credit: SciTechDaily.com Scientists’ model indicates that dark matter inside gas giants could collapse into black holes detectable by observation. Astronomers have identified more than 5,000 planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. These distant worlds, known as …

A new study published in The Astronomical Journal has revealed an astonishing possibility: free-floating planets, long considered cosmic castaways, may not be as solitary as once thought. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers observed that several of these starless giants are surrounded by dusty disks—structures typically seen in early planetary systems. This discovery points to the potential formation of …

Free-floating, planetary-mass objects that are just drifting carefree through the galaxy, untethered and starless, appear to be able to generate their own systems of moons, like a planetary system on a miniature scale. An analysis of new JWST observations on a number of rogue planets – each weighing between five and 10 Jupiters – has revealed the presence of disks …

Topline Sky-watchers who saw the Venus-Jupiter conjunction on Tuesday, Aug. 12, will have glimpsed the first act of the six-planet “planet parade” that’s building in the eastern sky before sunrise. Best seen about an hour before sunrise, bright planets Venus and Jupiter — now beginning to draw away from each other — will dominate in the east while Saturn brightens …

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sped by Pluto in 2015, it revealed an incredible world of ice and haze carved by various geological processes — hinting that an ocean may have played a role in the dwarf planet’s recent history. The bounty of scientific riches has left researchers working to solve some of the tiny world’s mysteries a decade after …

So much for heliocentrism. An international team of astronomers using observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope have found evidence of massive planets out there that’re capable of forming their own planetary systems — without a star.  These planets would be the center of something like a mini version of our solar system where other, smaller planets revolve around …