Determining the length of a single day on a planet is usually pretty easy. You just pick a landmark and wait for it to reach the exact same point twice in its rotation and you have your answer. For astronomers studying Saturn, it’s not nearly as easy as that. Saturn doesn’t have any easily visible …
An as-of-yet unseen planet may be lurking at the very distant edge of our Solar System… or it might not exist at all. That incredibly vague and unsatisfying idea is the sum total of what scientists have been able to tell us about the mysterious “Planet Nine,” and it doesn’t look like we’re getting any …
It’s been a big year for Uranus. We’ve learned quite a bit about the planet thanks to new research efforts aimed at explaining why it behaves dramatically different when compared to the other planets in our system. Back in July we learned that the planet’s bizarre rotation — it spins at a nearly 90-degree angle …
You’ve really got to hand it to space scientists. They regularly deliver mind-blowing news that tells us more and more about the universe we live in, and they manage to do it all while keeping a pretty good sense of humor. Take the recent discovery of a new, super-distant Solar System object called 2018 VG18, …
NASA hardware tends to last a long time, but few spacecraft can match the longevity of the two Voyager probes. The twin spacecrafts were launched way back in 1977, and now NASA has revealed that Voyager-2 just achieved a milestone that only its sister ship has accomplished before it: entering interstellar space. Voyager-2’s transition to …
Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System, and the competition really isn’t even close. It’s an absolutely massive planet and it helped define what a gas giant planet truly is. Because of its size, it might be hard to imagine a time when Jupiter had a problem growing, but new research suggests that …
The Sun is the oldest body in our Solar System — and since everything in our system revolves around it, that obviously makes perfect sense — springing to life somewhere around 4.6 billion years ago. The planets formed millions of years later from the material that was orbiting the star, and because of this it’s …
It’s tempting to imagine that the asteroids that litter our Solar System have been there from the start, circling the Sun for ages while the planets formed, but new research suggests that things simply didn’t play out that way. They weren’t just transient collections of dusty and debris that happened to form larger rocks. No, …
Our Solar System is a pretty calm place these days, all things considered, but that wasn’t always the case. In the period when the planets were still forming, collisions between various large bodies were common, and they ultimately helped shape the system that we see today. New research shows that Uranus, a chilly, hostile planet …
Everything you see around you — from the birds flying above to the grass below your feet and even the digital display you’re reading this on — is made up of particles that were once floating listlessly in outer space. Over billions of years, a lot of that material formed stars, planets, and eventually life …
