Planet

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.

Astronomers have discovered strange radio signals that could be coming from unseen planets. Models suggest that interactions between the magnetic fields of planets and their host stars produce radio emissions – a new potential way to detect planets.

One Sun is plenty for our solar system, but some planets have been found orbiting two stars at once. Now the ante has been upped again, with evidence emerging of a planet orbiting three stars at once.

In the hunt for extraterrestrial life, most of our attention has been focused on Earth-like worlds. But now, astronomers have defined a new class of exoplanet called “Hycean” worlds that could be a promising place to find signs of life.

NASA's InSight has provided … well, insight, into the inner workings of the Red Planet. By monitoring marsquakes over the past two years, the instrument measured the thickness and composition of Mars’ crust, mantle and core, revealing some surprises.

Space is an exceptionally strange place, full of signals and observations that defy our understanding of the universe. In trying to explain these mysteries, sometimes astronomers hypothesize extremely exotic objects that we haven’t yet found.

Astronomers have counted the number of neutrons inside carbon atoms from 2.8 quadrillion km away. The team managed to measure the ratios of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time, which can tell us about how it formed.

Mercury’s disproportionately massive core may be the result of the Sun’s powerful magnetic influence rather than the consequence of a cataclysmic collision with another body in the ancient past, according to the results of a new study.

Astronomers have used computer modeling to reveal the chaotic fate of a distant solar system in which the planets orbit in near perfect synchronization, and in the process shed light on how ancient white dwarfs become polluted with debris.

Not all planets orbit stars - some drift freely through the cosmos on their own. These cold, dark worlds don’t make great candidates for hosting life, but a new study suggests that their moons could be more habitable than they might seem.

ESA has selected EnVision as its next Venus orbiter. Scheduled to launch between 2031 and 2033, the robotic deep-space probe will carry out a comprehensive survey of Earth's sibling planet to learn why the two turned out so very different.