Help keep Salon independent

Topic: Solar System

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took this image of Ceres’ south polar region on May 17, 2017. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Dwarf planet could reveal origin of life

Elizabeth Howell
Pluto and Charon (Getty Images/HYPERSPHERE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Pluto captured its moon with a kiss

Elizabeth Hlavinka
An artist's impression of the Voyager 1 space probe flying past Saturn in the outer solar system, circa 1980. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Getty Images)

Efforts to revive NASA’s Voyager 1 probe

Troy Farah
Mars and Deimos (Getty Images/ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI)

Origin of Deimos thrown into question

Matthew Rozsa
Advertisement:
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by astronomers using the wide-field survey camera at the Zwicky Transient Facility this year in early March. (NASA/Dan Bartlett)

How to see a comet coming close to Earth

Troy Farah
A NASA image of one of the Voyager space probes. Voyager 1 and its identical sister craft Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space. (NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Voyager 1 is sending back weird signals

Matthew Rozsa
Thermal images of Neptune taken between 2006 and 2020. (ESO/M. Roman, NAOJ/Subaru/COMICS)

Neptune's seasons are broken

Nicole Karlis
Planet Pluto illustration incorporating NASA New Horizons terrain imagery (Getty Images/HYPERSPHERE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

The forgotten "planets" of our sun

Matthew Rozsa
Advertisement:
Artist rendition of an asteroid pair, shortly after separation. Over millennia these objects will drift apart and become harder to identify. At 300 years old, the asteroid pair 2019 PR2 and 2019 QR6 are the youngest found to date. (UC Berkeley/SETI Institute)

The youngest asteroids ever found

Nicole Karlis
Magnet Over Earth (Getty Images/CSA Images)

Is Earth inside a magnetic tunnel?

Matthew Rozsa
Outspace orbital view of planets and moons (Getty Images/Lev Savitskiy)

How moons are made

Matthew Rozsa
Meteorite in orbit (Getty Images)

Unlocking a meteorite's ancient clues

Matthew Rozsa
Advertisement:
Planet Venus (Albert Klein/Getty Images)

Why NASA just greenlit two Venus probes

Nicole Karlis
Universe, planets and lots of stars (Getty Images)

Planetoid hints at new era in astronomy

Matthew Rozsa
(Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images)

Even planets have their (size) limits

Natalie Hinkel - The Conversation
Venus

Volcanoes discovered on Venus

Nicole Karlis
Advertisement:
This artist’s impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. (ESO/L. Calçada)

Why Betelgeuse may go supernova

Shira Tarlo
This illustration shows the white dwarf WDJ0914+1914 and its Neptune-like exoplanet. Since the icy giant orbits the hot white dwarf at close range, the extreme ultraviolet radiation from the star strips away the planet’s atmosphere. While most of this stripped gas escapes, some of it swirls into a disc, itself accreting onto the white dwarf. (ESO/M. Kornmesser)

A dissolving exoplanet's prophesy

Nicole Karlis
Saturn with moons (Getty Images)

An Earth-like moon orbiting Saturn

Nicole Karlis
Neptune's inner moons Naiad and Thalassa enable them to avoid each other as they race around the planet. (NASA)

Neptune's strange, "dancing" moons

Nicole Karlis
Advertisement:
A new SPHERE/VLT image of Hygiea, which could be the Solar System’s smallest dwarf planet yet. As an object in the main asteroid belt, Hygiea satisfies right away three of the four requirements to be classified as a dwarf planet: it orbits around the Sun, it is not a moon and, unlike a planet, it has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. The final requirement is that it have enough mass that its own gravity pulls it into a roughly spherical shape. This is what VLT observations have now revealed about Hygiea. (ESO/P. Vernazza et al./MISTRAL algorithm (ONERA/CNRS))

Is Hygiea the new Pluto?

Nicole Karlis
(Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images)

Exoplanets better suited for life?

Mike Wehner - BGR

How did Uranus end up on its side?

Jacob Kegerreis - The Conversation
(Getty/rajeshbac)

Liquid water on Mars! For real this time

Emily Lakdawalla - Sky & Telescope
« Previous
Page: 1
Next »
Advertisement: