When a distant planet appears as a point of light in a telescope, it's hard to imagine what things are like at the surface. Does rain fall? Is the atmosphere thick, or dissipating into space? How ...
A highly stylized rendition of our solar system NASA/JPL If someone asked which planet was closest to Earth, you’d be pretty certain — it’s Venus. We measure distances in the solar system in terms of ...
The universe, as Douglas Adams so memorably explained, is big. Really big. But so are the things inside it -- even objects like the Solar System, which on a galactic scale are absolutely minuscule. A ...
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Tucked between a boiled-away desert and a giant snowball, an alien world called TRAPPIST-1e may ...
(THE CONVERSATION) The search for life beyond Earth is a key driver of modern astronomy and planetary science. The U.S. is building multiple major telescopes and planetary probes to advance this ...
Astronomers have spent the past decade cataloguing thousands of planets beyond the solar system, many of them falling into a ...