Scientists may have discovered large amounts of water hidden deep beneath the surface of Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot. The discovery, which was made using ground-based telescopes, opens up the possibility that extremophile lifeforms could exist in the atmosphere of the enigmatic gas giant.
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With surface temperatures of up to 4,327° C (7,820° F), exoplanet KELT-9b is hotter than many stars – and, according to a new discovery, hot enough to vaporize heavy metals. Researchers have now detected iron and titanium vapor in KELT-9b’s atmosphere.
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It’s long been thought that spiders were "ballooning" on silk parachutes thanks to the wind picking them up, but a new study has found that the creatures are actually making use of atmospheric electric fields instead.
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Although there are trillions of liters of water floating around in the air, it’s not easily accessible. Now engineers have developed a device powered by the Sun that can pluck practical quantities of drinkable water out of thin air, and they've successfully field-tested it in the Arizona desert.
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An important arm of exoplanet research involves the study of the atmospheres that surround these distant worlds. The molecules they hold can reveal valuable insights into what kind conditions can be found there – along with ones that cannot.
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An international team of astronomers has made the first-ever detection of helium in the atmosphere of an extrasolar world. The new technique used to make the discovery could pave the way for scientists hoping to reveal the atmospheres of distant Earth-sized exoplanets.
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Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have put together the first global carbon dioxide maps based on data from the Chinese satellite TanSat. The satellite also measures “carbon dioxide flux,” changes in its behavior on Earth and in the Earth's atmosphere.
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The ESA/Roscosmos Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is mere weeks away from commencing its atmospheric search for evidence of recent geological activity, and possibly life on everyone’s favorite Red Planet.
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NASA has released a somber view of Saturn, created from some of the final images captured by the Cassini spacecraft. An annotated version of the image highlights the region of Saturn’s cloud surface in which Cassini ended its epic mission by diving into the atmosphere of the gas giant.
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A new study has calculated there is more than 15 million gallons of toxic mercury trapped in the permafrost north of the equator. That's around 10 times the mercury emissions produced by humans over the past 30 years and researchers are understandably concerned about the effects it could have.
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