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Categories: Space: The Solar System

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An updated thermal model for Pluto suggests that a liquid water ocean beneath the dwarf planet's ice shell is a fairly likely scenario, and that the ocean is probably still there today.

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Venus has an 'electric wind' strong enough to remove the components of water from its upper atmosphere, which may have played a significant role in stripping the planet of its oceans.

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Astronomers are researching the way in which celestial bodies orbit each other, now and in the future. This often turns out to be more erratic than you might think.

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Using computer models, New Horizons team members have been able to determine the depth of the layer of solid nitrogen ice within Pluto's distinctive 'heart' feature -- a large plain informally known as Sputnik Planum -- and how fast that ice is flowing.

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It happens only a little more than once a decade and the next chance to see it is Monday, May 9, 2016. Throughout the US, sky watchers can watch Mercury pass between Earth and the sun in a rare astronomical event known as a planetary transit. Three NASA satellites will be providing images of the transit and one of them will have a near-live feed.

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On 9 May there will be a rare transit of Mercury, when the smallest planet in our Solar System will pass directly between the Earth and the Sun. The last time this happened was in 2006, and the next two occasions will be in 2019 and 2032. During the transit, which takes place in the afternoon and early evening in the UK, Mercury will appear as a dark silhouetted disk against the bright surface of the Sun.

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Peering to the outskirts of our solar system, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a small, dark moon orbiting Makemake, the second brightest icy dwarf planet -- after Pluto -- in the Kuiper Belt.

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Solar storms trigger Jupiter's intense 'Northern Lights' by generating a new X-ray aurora that is eight times brighter than normal and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth's aurora borealis, finds new research.

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A student-built instrument riding on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft found only a handful of dust grains, the building blocks of planets, when it whipped by Pluto at 31,000 miles per hour last July.

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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.