The solar system appears to have been traveling through the molecular remnants of ancient supernovae for the past 33,000 years, at least according to the presence of a rare type of iron that shouldn’t even exist on Earth. Born in the fiery collapse of massive stars as they explode into supernovae,read more
Data collected from the New Horizons space probe’s 2019 flyby of a snowman-shaped object at the edge of the solar system has settled a debate about how the early solar system formed. Previously, there had been two prevailing theories regarding how this happened: either the matter in the proto-planetary disk smashed together violently—eventually forming the Sun, planets and other bodiesread more
Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have broken new ground in exoplanet research by directly observing a planet in another solar system using a new imaging technique. This new method provided enough detail about the far-flung planet to reveal the presence of a complex, planet-wide storm—and a strange puzzleread more
Despite being our closest neighbor in the heavens, the planet Venus still harbors a multitude of mysteries, due primarily to its thick cloud cover, obscuring the planet’s surface from study. Space probes sent to its surface are also only able to glean a scant amount of information: because of the intense heat and pressure at Venus’s surface, most probes fail after less then an hour. Adding to the mystique of the Morning Star is a newly-found wave propagating across the planet’s atmosphere, and the idea that Venus’s dark streaks may hold microbial life.
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