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Categories: Physics: Acoustics and Ultrasound, Space: The Solar System

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Pluto's surface exhibits a wide variety of landscapes, results from five new studies. The dwarf planet has more differences than similarities with its large moon, Charon.

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Aurorasaurus is a citizen science project that tracks auroras through the project's website, mobile apps and Twitter.

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Scientists have long been puzzled by Mercury's very dark surface. Previously, scientists proposed that the darkness came from carbon accumulated by comet impacts. Now scientists confirm that carbon is present at Mercury's surface, but that it most likely originated deep below the surface, in the form of a now-disrupted and buried ancient graphite-rich crust, which was later brought to the surface via impacts after most of the current crust formed.

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Using observations from the Cassini spacecraft, a team of astronomers has been able to specify the possible positions of a ninth planet in the Solar System.

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Pluto's largest moon may have gotten too big for its own skin. Images from NASA's New Horizons mission suggest that Pluto's moon Charon once had a subsurface ocean that has long since frozen and expanded, pushing outward and causing the moon's surface to stretch and fracture on a massive scale.

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Every school kid learns the basic structure of the Earth: a thin outer crust, a thick mantle, and a Mars-sized core. But is this structure universal? Will rocky exoplanets orbiting other stars have the same three layers? New research suggests that the answer is yes -- they will have interiors very similar to Earth.

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The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens. But life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, say astrobiologists. In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realized new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

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Researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

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A team of scientists has discovered a highly unusual planetary system comprised of a sun-like star, a dwarf star, and an enormous planet sandwiched in between.

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The planet Mercury is being pelted regularly by bits of dust from an ancient comet, a new study has concluded. This has a discernible effect in the planet's tenuous atmosphere and may lead to a new paradigm on how these airless bodies maintain their ethereal envelopes.

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It's like something out of an interplanetary chess game. Astrophysicists have found that a close encounter with Jupiter about four billion years ago may have resulted in another planet's ejection from the Solar System altogether.

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Thanks to a lucky conjunction of two satellites, a ground-based array of all-sky cameras, and some spectacular aurora borealis, researchers have uncovered evidence for an unexpected role that electrons have in creating the dancing auroras. Though humans have been seeing auroras for thousands of years, we have only recently begun to understand what causes them.

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When the sun hurls a billion tons of high-energy particles and magnetic fields into space at speeds of more than a million miles per hour and the 'space weather' conditions are right, the resulting geomagnetic storm at Earth can wreak havoc on communication and navigation systems, electrical power grids, and pose radiation hazards to astronauts and airline passengers and crew.

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Compared to its celestial neighbors Venus and Mars, Earth is a pretty habitable place. So how did we get so lucky? A new study sheds light on the improbable evolutionary path that enabled Earth to sustain life.

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Back in 1930, it was an easy answer -- Pluto was a planet because we couldn't see anything else brighter at a similar distance away from us, says a cosmologist. Then, in the 1990s, astronomers began detecting more and more planet-like objects around Pluto and the questions started -- was Pluto a planet or not?

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Two of NASA's heliophysics missions can now claim planetary science on their list of scientific findings. A group of scientists used the Venus transit -- a very rare event where a planet passes between Earth and the sun, appearing to us as a dark dot steadily making its way across the sun's bright face -- to make measurements of how the Venusian atmosphere absorbs different kinds of light.

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Almost 2000 exoplanets have been discovered to date, ranging from rocky Earth-like planets to hot-Jupiters, and orbiting every type of star. But how many of these distant worlds are habitable? Today’s technology means that we currently have very little information about what exoplanets are like beyond their presence, size and distance from star. With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope we may have our first glimpses into atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets.

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The interiors of several of our Solar System's planets and moons are icy, and ice has been found on distant extrasolar planets, as well. This ice must exist under extreme pressures and high-temperatures, and potentially contains salty impurities, too. New research focuses on the physics underlying the formation of the types of ice that are stable under these paradoxical-seeming conditions. It could challenge current ideas about the physical properties found inside icy planetary bodies.

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If planets had personalities, Mars would be a rock star according to recent preliminary results from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft. Mars sports a 'Mohawk' of escaping atmospheric particles at its poles, 'wears' a layer of metal particles high in its atmosphere, and lights up with aurora after being smacked by solar storms. MAVEN is also mapping out the escaping atmospheric particles.

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Researchers combing through the data from the Venus Express mission have found new evidence of active lava flows on Earth's nearest neighbor.