Tag Archives: planet

The European Space Agency’s long-delayed ExoMars mission is back on track with a little help from NASA. The US space agency has signed an agreement to offer launch services and lander components for the mission. With NASA’s help, the European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to get the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin …

Like many people, I grew up in a solar system of nine planets. It’s the same solar system we live in now, of course, but the definition of a “planet” changed in 2006 to exclude poor little Pluto and its frosty kin. That was before we’d even seen the little …

Humanity has existed for 300,000 years, give or take a millennium. That might sound like a long time when the average human lives at most a few decades, but it’s really just a cosmic blink of the eye. Even if Homo sapiens exceeds all expectations and survives both political strife …

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that you can’t just nuke an incoming asteroid to save the planet, no matter what Hollywood movies have told you. The logic is quite straightforward; blowing space rocks into pieces would cause an even deadlier rain of smaller astroids that would pelt the …

If the 21st century has taught us any astronomical lessons, it’s that counting planets is hard. In 2000, there were nine planets, and now there are eight, but that might not last. Astronomers have been on the hunt for a theorized ninth planet in the extreme outer solar system, and …

The number of known planets in our solar system has changed over time, but we’re currently sitting at eight since the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet. However, some scientists believe there is a ninth planet lurking out there in the inky blackness at the edge of the solar system. …

The sky is full of stars, and for the first time in human history, we know what’s orbiting some of them. There are more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets, but just a few have been directly imaged. A young gas giant called PDS 70c is one of them, and now astronomers …

  It used to be easy to know how many planets there were: nine. It had been nine planets for an entire generation before scientists started rethinking what counts as a planet. Pluto is out, but some astronomers believe there’s a real ninth planet lurking out there. Others aren’t convinced, …

  Every asteroid that falls to Earth is a potential window into the origins of the solar system, but scientists have stumbled upon something quite strange when studying a fragment of the Almahata Sitta asteroid. It contains evidence of a huge, previously unknown object in our solar system — perhaps …

  The Hubble Space Telescope has been spying on a very unusual exoplanet some 336 light years away. The planet, known as HD 106906 b, is 11 times the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits the binary stars at a distance of nearly 68 billion miles — 730 times greater …