planetary-science

Venus likely never had a moon and even if it did, it would have soon been torn asunder by the planet’s own gravity, says prominent planetary astrophysicist.

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[Planetary Science Journal] The continuous discovery of exoplanets, each with distinctive stellar and planetary properties, along with the development of higher resolution ground and space telescopes has positioned climate evolution […] The post Climates Of Gl 514 b appeared first on Astrobiology .

JWST observations reveal that Chariklo’s mysterious rings have changed, exposing new clues about distant solar system evolution.

The sun may have swallowed a super-Earth planet in its early history, and our star may still be hiding the evidence, new research suggests.

New estimates using the planet’s surface wrinkles show that our smallest planet is growing even smaller, at a faster clip than expected.

Neptune’s tiny moons may be ancient wreckage, preserving material exposed when a catastrophic event shattered much larger icy worlds. In 1989, Voyager 2 discovered six previously unknown moons around Neptune. Five of them are tiny satellites that travel just beyond the planet’s main rings. Their small size and great distance from Earth have made them [...]

Pluto’s hazy, multilayered atmosphere is thinning out as it enters the coldest part of the Plutonian year. Above, the atmosphere is backlit by the Sun after the New Horizons flyby in 2015. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI , Public Domain

Pluto’s hazy, multilayered atmosphere is thinning out as it enters the coldest part of the Plutonian year. Above, the atmosphere is backlit by the Sun after the New Horizons flyby in 2015. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI , Public Domain

Scientists were shocked when they received the first images of Martian gullies. They were even more shocked as those gullies appeared to change over time. Their similarities to gullies seen on Earth were uncanny, but all of Earth’s gullies are formed by the water run-off, and Martian is too cold and has too sparse an atmosphere to have liquid water on its surface. Whatever has been causing those …

Researchers crushed and heated ice between diamond anvils to confirm the existence of a phase of ice that could be present in the warm mantles of ice giants.

Chang’e-6 samples suggest the Moon’s two very different sides may have formed when uneven heating drove magma from one hemisphere to the other. The Moon presents two dramatically different faces. Its Earth-facing hemisphere is rich in dark volcanic plains, while the farside is dominated by older highlands and a much thicker crust. New analyses of […]

Scientists have discovered that the Moon-forming collision may have depended heavily on how hot and physically strong early Earth and Theia were. New simulations found that some impacts create the familiar disk of debris that later becomes the Moon, while others can produce an intact Moon in only about five hours. The results challenge the long-standing assumption that the enormous collision coul…

Mercury has been slowly shrinking for billions of years, and a new study suggests that the planet has contracted much more than scientists previously estimated. Mercury’s surface is covered with long cliffs, ridges and other wrinkle-like features. These structures formed as the planet’s interior cooled and became smaller, forcing its solid outer layers to crumple […] The post Mercury May Have Los…

[NASA]. Ares Vallis is a large valley that was carved billions of years ago by water flowing across the surface of Mars. This image shows an area where the flowing […] The post Landforms In Ares Vallis Carved Out By Ancient Water Flow appeared first on Astrobiology .

Ancient meteorite minerals reveal a surprisingly strong magnetic field from the solar system’s first 200,000 years. About 4.6 billion years ago, before the Sun and planets existed in their familiar forms, the solar system was a vast cloud of gas and dust. Within a few million years, this “solar nebula” collapsed and flattened into a [...]

Chang’e-6 samples suggest the Moon’s two very different sides may have formed when uneven heating drove magma from one hemisphere to the other. The Moon presents two dramatically different faces. Its Earth-facing hemisphere is rich in dark volcanic plains, while the farside is dominated by older highlands and a much thicker crust. New analyses of [...]

Generally mild weather and increasing hours of darkness make September a great month for observing, and this year, there’s a particularly busy sky.

JAXA's Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) will be on its way to Mars and Phobos next month. It will collect samples from Phobos and return them to Earth. A new morphodynamic atlas of the small moon will help scientists collect and understand the samples.

Nature Geoscience, Published online: 10 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41561-026-02094-y The single-cell Hadley circulation on Mars limits the mixing of materials across the cell’s interior and exterior, and it also leads to a pole-to-pole connection. This regime is created by the dominance of the mean flow over turbulences, which are dampened by the rapid temperature relaxation in the Martian atmo…