Early analysis of the fragments has shown something equally rare. The meteorite is an aubrite, a class with unknown origins that some scientists argue may be pieces of the planet Mercury.
The moon has shrunk by more than 45 metres in circumference over the last few hundred million years because of its core gradually cooling.
The beginning of the Universe has always been something of a chicken-and-egg problem. Did stars and galaxies form first, with black holes slowly coalescing in their midst? Or did black holes appear before the first galaxies?
Saturn's small, crater-covered moon Mimas may have a vast ocean under its thick icy surface, according to a new paper.
On February 3, 2024, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a second close flyby of Io, the third largest of Jupiter’s moons. We were able to see a volcunic erruption there like never before.
If confirmed, these would be the first directly-imaged planets that are similar to the giant planets in our own Solar System, and they would demonstrate that widely separated giant planets like Jupiter survive stellar evolution.
A “super-Earth” ripe for further investigation orbits a small, reddish star that is, by astronomical standards, fairly close to us – only 137 light-years away.
We don’t usually think of planets as having tails, like comets, but sometimes they do. One giant hot Jupiter exoplanet WASP-69b has a tail of gas much longer than previously estimated.
A team of scientists have performed an intensive investigation of Ryugu samples, discovering evidence that points to cometary organic matter being transported from space to the near-Earth region.
It’s oh-so-easy to be absolutely mesmerized by these spiral galaxies. Follow their clearly defined arms, which are brimming with stars, to their centers, where there may be old star clusters and – sometimes – active supermassive black holes.
Certainly, we could tap into all the heat and kinetic energy of a black hole's accretion disk and jets, but even if all you had was a black hole in empty space, you could still extract energy from a trick known as the Penrose process.
A small black hole is helping scientists understand how mysterious cosmic rays can barrel through the Universe and hit Earth at nearly the speed of light.
If life ever existed on Mars, the Perseverance rover’s verification of lake sediments at the base of the Jezero crater reinforces the hope that traces might be found in the crater.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere.
An international team of researchers has gained new insights into the formation of diamond rain on icy planets such as Neptune and Uranus, using the X-ray laser European XFEL in Schenefeld.
