Planetary Science

After NASA deliberately crushes a car-sized spacecraft into an asteroid the following week, it´ll be up to European Space Agency’s Hera mission to investigate the “crime scene” and discover the secrets of these potentially devastating space rocks. NASA’s Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) aims to collide with the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on Monday night, hoping […]

The brand-new project entails putting three guardian satellites carrying loads of fuel and kinetic weapons into the moon’s orbit around the Earth. China’s “Planetary Defense System” has been capturing momentum recently, with Beijing researchers now planning to utilize the moon to safeguard Earth from asteroid strikes that could potentially wipe out a city or even

MIT astronomers have discovered a new multiplanet system that exists just 10 parsecs, or approximately 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. The star at the system’s heart likely hosts at least two terrestrial, Earth-sized planets. Credit: MIT News, with TESS Satellite figure courtesy of NASA.

NASA states it could detect “surface features” and even “hints of habitability” on distant planets. NASA is financing research for a conceptual telescope called a “solar gravitational lens” (SGL) that can allow us to observe remote exoplanets at a fantastic resolution– a futuristic endeavor that might assist discovery at last if we are alone in

Water vapor in the atmosphere of planet TOI-674 b This newly found planet, a bit larger than Neptune and orbiting a red-dwarf star roughly 150 light-years away. This size places it in an exclusive club: exoplanets, or planets around different stars, recognized to have water vapor in their atmospheres. Several questions linger, such as how

New high-resolution observations reveal a Moon-forming area around exoplanet PDS 70c. The monitorings have allowed astronomers to establish the ring-shaped region’s size and mass for the first time. Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics|Harvard & Smithsonian have helped detect the apparent existence of a Moon-forming area around an exoplanet– a planet outside of our Solar