Patterns in mud cracks show that Mars may have had cyclical moisture patterns. Left: the terrain in the Gale Crater where Curiosity is currently exploring. Right: mud cracks on Earth, where wet-dry cycling has occurred, creating Y-shaped patterns. Credit: Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06220-3 Scientists aren’t entirely sure how life began on Earth, but one prevailing…
Category: Planets
NASA InSight study finds Mars is spinning faster
NASA’s InSight lander captured this selfie on April 24, 2022, the 1,211th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Dust on its solar panels caused the lander to lose power in December of that year, but data recorded by InSight’s instruments is still leading to new science. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Scientists have made the most precise…
New exoplanet discovery builds better understanding of planet formation
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain An international team of scientists has discovered an unusual Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a low-mass star called TOI-4860, located in the Corvus constellation. The newly discovered gas giant, named TOI-4860 b, is an unusual planet for two reasons: Stars of such low mass are not expected to host planets like Jupiter, and…
Geomagnetic field protects Earth from electron showers
Altitude profiles of the collision rate per electron for the cases of the precipitation of 1, 4, 10, 40, 100, 400 and 1,000 keV electrons whose initial pitch angle is 70 degrees at an altitude of 400 km (thick solid lines). Credit: Yuto Katoh et al Understanding the ionosphere high in the Earth’s atmosphere is…
Curiosity rover faces its toughest climb yet on Mars
NASA’s Curiosity left several sets of tracks where the rover experienced a fault, or unexpected stoppage mid-drive, while attempting the most difficult climb the mission has faced: a slope with a sharp 23-degree incline, slippery sand, and wheel-size rocks. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech On Aug. 5, NASA’s Curiosity rover will notch its 11th year on Mars by…
Giant solar eruption felt on Earth, moon and Mars
A coronal mass ejection erupted from the sun on 28 October 2021 and was so big that Mars and Earth, while on opposite sides of the sun, both received an influx of solar energetic particles. Credit: ATG, ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO A coronal mass ejection erupted from the sun on 28 October 2021 and…
Scientists use NASA MESSENGER mission data to measure chromium on Mercury
Color-coded chromium abundance map overlain on MESSENGER image of Mercury. Credit: Larry Nittler/ASU The origin of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is mysterious in many ways. It has a metallic core, like Earth, but its core makes up a much larger fraction of its volume—85% compared to 15% for Earth. The NASA Discovery-class…
Sun 'umbrella' tethered to asteroid might help mitigate climate change
Credit: Brooks Bays/UH Institute for Astronomy Earth is rapidly warming and scientists are developing a variety of approaches to reduce the effects of climate change. István Szapudi, an astronomer at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, has proposed a novel approach—a solar shield to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting Earth, combined with a…
Two additional exoplanets detected in a nearby planetary system
HARPS RV time series of GJ 367 along with the best-fitting five-signal model (three planets + stellar rotation + long-period stellar signal). Data are shown as blue filled circles with their nominal uncertainties. The vertical gray lines mark the error bars including the RV jitter. Credit: Goffo et al., 2023. By conducting radial velocity (RV)…
Astronomers discover striking evidence of 'unusual' stellar evolution
Credit: Drew Evans / NASA Astronomers have found evidence that some stars boast unexpectedly strong surface magnetic fields, a discovery that challenges current models of how they evolve. In stars like our sun, surface magnetism is linked to stellar spin, a process similar to the inner workings of a hand-cranked flashlight. Strong magnetic fields are…