Even if we don’t destroy ourselves, we always have the Universe to contend with. Wiping out all life on Earth is hard, but causing mass extinctions is easy. The 1991 eruption […]
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You searched for: Pluto
On Tuesday, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the space rock, located some 4 billion miles away from Earth.
For the Pluto fans, another sad state of affairs: your favorite world won’t make it. Nothing on Earth lasts forever, and that’s a truth that even extends to all the objects […]
When we place the known objects in the Solar System in order, four inner, rocky worlds and four, outer, giant worlds stand out. Traditionally, these were defined as planets. Will […]
Any hypothesis, no matter how alluring, must be confronted with the full suite of data. Our Solar System may be the closest part of the Universe to us as we look […]
A vacuum cleaner is the wrong picture. Time to bust that myth. There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present […]
A case for looking beyond the planetary scientist’s (or even the astronomer’s) definition. Ever since 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially defined the term planet — introducing the term ‘dwarf […]
A special isotope of plutonium is necessary for missions to Mars and beyond. But we don’t have enough, and aren’t making more fast enough. As 2018 comes to a close, NASA […]
The IAU has just approved a dozen new names for features on Pluto’s moon Charon. They draw from an array of famous authors, characters, mythical objects and one U.S. filmmaker.
From 4 billion miles away, it says a lot about the meaning of time.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft taught us more than we ever imagined about Saturn. Could we do something similar for Uranus and Neptune? From where we are in the Solar System, looking out […]
Two of our biggest science-fiction dreams might not remain fiction for much longer. Here’s how 21st-century science could make it real. For as long as human beings have looked up at […]
If a star spins and then collapses, what happens to its angular momentum? The most common way to form a black hole in the Universe is to have a massive […]
The Boomerang Nebula, in our galaxy, is even colder than completely empty space. Here’s how that’s possible. Imagine the coldest place you possibly can. Inside it, the particles that make […]
A single, complete view of half the world was enough to teach us how these distant, frozen bodies work. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto. Pluto’s atmosphere, […]
Sedna could be the very first known object from the Inner Oort Cloud. But time is running out to create and launch a mission. In 2003, scientists discovered an object beyond […]
The cosmic records we have are meant to be broken, but oh, have we ever gone so far. The great cosmic abyss contains more that humanity can ever hope to see, […]
From billions of miles away, a faint, single pixel shows us how precious and alone Earth truly is. There are people alive today who can remember a time where no human-made […]
In order to reap the greatest rewards, we have to think big and invest big. One of these four missions will deliver like never before. When it comes to exploring the […]
Space may be enormous, but collisions are inevitable. Here’s what happens when they occur. The Universe as we know it has been around for nearly 14 billion years: plenty of time […]
Some of the meteorites that strike our planet originate from our red neighbor, Mars. Here’s how we know. As the planets orbit the Sun, well-separated from one another, we tend to […]
If atmospheric hazes can cool the distant ice dwarf by an extra 30 degrees Celsius, maybe we can geoengineer a solution to our warming problem? When NASA’s New Horizons flew by […]
And what do we still have left to learn? The original idea of a black hole goes all the way back to 1783, when Cambridge scientist John Michell recognized that a […]
The most surefire, easily-seen signature of life on Earth might be a cosmic red herring around other worlds. In our quest for life beyond the Solar System, it makes sense to […]
Mars will never look as big as the full Moon. But it isn’t even the biggest planet. From humanity’s perspective, the Sun and Moon always dominate Earth’s skies. The Moon and […]
We aren’t lunarly exclusive. Earth has a few minimoons whizzing around us, including one that comes back into our orbit every 20 years or so.
A recent study points to the possibility that just 70,000 years ago, a star passed through our Solar System. How often does this happen, and what are the consequences? We […]
White dwarfs, neutron stars, and brown dwarfs aren’t actually stars at all. Here’s why. When it comes to stars, there’s a huge variety of different types out there. Our Sun is […]
If you thought LIGO’s recent discoveries were profound and unusual, wait until you meet OJ 287. Recently, LIGO has revolutionized our knowledge of the Universe by discovering merging black holes. The […]
NASA and SETI invite the public to nickname a small icy world, or pair of worlds, in the distant Kuiper Belt ahead of a New Horizons 2019 flyby.