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Planetary Atmospheres
Earth is the Solar System's only known inhabited planet. Could Venus, if its phosphine signal is real, be our second world with life?
From life on Earth to the planet itself, there are four ways our planet will actually experience "the end," no matter how we define it.
Multiple lines of evidence — physical, chemical, and biological — must converge for scientists to conclude that alien life has been found.
Despite being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury "only" reaches 800 °F at its hottest. Venus is always hotter, even at night.
The pulse took just 35 hours to cover the whole world.
A newly discovered “ultrahot Jupiter” has the shortest orbit of any known gas giant.
We once thought the Moon was completely airless, but it turns out it has an atmosphere, after all. Even wilder: It has a tail of its own.
And why, even at its faintest, it always outshines every other star and planet. If you’ve been looking to the west after sunset recently, you may have noticed that there’s one […]
Here’s how the closest place to “hell” in our Solar System might actually be home to life. From afar, Venus seems like the most uninhabitable planet of all. NASA’s Magellan mission […]
It’s a great scientific opportunity of modern times, but we won’t get there with our current observatories. One of the holy grails of modern science is to find a world, […]
The two planets most suited for habitability had very different fates. At last, scientists know why. Imagine the early days of our Solar System, going back billions of years. The Sun […]
Earth wasn’t the only potentially habitable planet in the early Solar System. What happened to Mars? If you could travel back in time to the early stages of the Solar System, […]
All the other planets have craters, icecaps, clouds, or a rich, banded structure. But not Uranus. The eight major planets of the Solar System all possess their own unique features. The […]
After a generation, we’re finally getting another close-up view. With the science we’re learning, we just might solve its mysteries. “Jupiter instead cooled down below the threshold for fusion, but […]
The red planet once wasn’t so different from Earth. Here’s what happened. “Mars’ atmosphere is so thin, you do not need a lot of streamlining. By the time the ship […]