Planet

Saturn is home to several solar system mysteries. Using data from Cassini, astronomers now suggest a simple answer to a few questions – a lost moon once orbited the planet before being torn to shreds.

Sending materials into space is expensive, so the more astronauts can make on-site, the better. Engineers have now demonstrated how crushed Martian rock could be mixed with a titanium alloy to make 3D-printable building materials.

Scientists have turned plastic into diamonds. Using high-powered lasers, the team zapped samples of common PET plastic, which produces intense heat and pressure to form tiny diamonds that may naturally rain down on planets like Uranus and Neptune.

The James Webb Space Telescope has snapped its first direct images of an exoplanet. With its uniquely powerful instruments, Webb captures details that other observatories miss, which will help us understand these distant worlds better.

The James Webb Space Telescope has clearly detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time. The find marks a milestone for the telescope’s goal of analyzing the air of distant planets to aid the search for alien life.

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has taken off over the last few decades. With the recent discovery of the 5,000th exoplanet coinciding with our own 20th anniversary, now is the perfect time to reflect on the milestones along the way.

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has now reached a major milestone. A new batch of 65 exoplanets brings the total number of confirmed planets beyond our solar system to over 5,000 – with potentially hundreds of billions left to find.

Astronomers may have detected a new exoplanet around Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our solar system. This tiny new world is one of the lightest ever discovered, which is even more impressive given the technique the team used to find it.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found that Earth’s inner core may be stranger than we thought. Rather than a plain solid, new simulations suggest it exists as a superionic state of matter, partway between a liquid and a solid.

Is there microbial life floating around in the clouds of Venus? Scientists have long pondered this question and soon we may get some answers, starting with a cloud-skimming mission in 2023 to search for signs of life.

Every year, the Hubble Space Telescope conducts a grand tour of the outer solar system planets, checking their turbulent atmospheres for changes in weather, storms, clouds and colors. This year’s shots are now in, revealing a few surprises.

Water can take on far more forms than many people give it credit for, and now scientists have recreated a particularly bizarre one in the lab – a “hot black ice” that may exist deep inside planets like Uranus and Neptune.