News
White rocks on Mars point to ancient rainfall and a wetter planet
5+ mon, 2+ week ago (385+ words) Pale rocks found by Perseverance suggest Mars once had heavy rain and long-lasting water that may support past life....
Mysterious dust ring beyond Jupiter formed many of our Solar System's earliest worlds
1+ hour, 54+ min ago (1136+ words) Simulations suggest one dust trap beyond Jupiter formed multiple planetesimal types over millions of years. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) In the young Solar System, a dust trap beyond Jupiter may have built wildly different meteorite parent bodies over two million…...
New discovery rewrites what we know about the speed of light
1+ day, 1+ hour ago (860+ words) A new review tightens limits on whether light changes speed in deep space, sharpening one of physics" most important tests. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) The speed of light remains one of physics" firmest assumptions, but scientists still test whether it ever shifts…...
JWST catches mineral clouds forming and fading on 'hot Jupiter' exoplanet
2+ day, 1+ hour ago (1080+ words) WASP-94 A b, a hot Jupiter nearly 700 light-years away, builds mineral cloud cover each morning and loses it by evening. This gives astronomers a rare clear view of its atmosphere and shows how cloud cycles can distort what distant worlds…...
Tiny black holes may form out of a crystal-like state in spacetime
2+ day, 4+ hour ago (381+ words) New math shows how a crystal-like critical state in spacetime can tip into a microscopic black hole. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Microscopic black holes have long hovered at the edge of theory, forming only in exquisitely balanced states. Now physicists…...
JWST finds methane in the atmosphere of a rare temperate Saturn-sized planet
3+ day, 1+ hour ago (856+ words) JWST detected methane in TOI-199 b, the first temperate giant exoplanet to have its atmosphere studied in detail. (CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech) TOI-199 b, a rare temperate giant planet, sits between scorching hot Jupiters and frozen gas giants, and JWST has…...
The case for water plumes on Europa just got much harder to make
3+ day, 23+ hour ago (391+ words) Reanalysis of 14 years of Hubble data weakens evidence for Europa plumes and sharpens the picture of its hydrogen atmosphere. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Europa's faint glow in ultraviolet light once looked like a possible water plume punching through ice. After…...
Dark crater laser could standardize lunar navigation and timekeeping
4+ day, 23+ hour ago (1213+ words) A lunar laser locked to an ultrastable silicon cavity placed inside one of the Moon's permanently shadowed craters could provide the infrastructure for a lunar time scale, Earth-Moon optical communication, satellite-based space distance measurements and imaging, and a space-based optical…...
Scientists discover new state of matter inside Uranus and Neptune
5+ day, 23+ hour ago (1207+ words) New simulations reveal a bizarre superionic carbon-hydrogen phase that may exist deep inside giant planets. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) Far beneath the thick blue clouds of Uranus and Neptune, matter may behave in ways never before seen. Under crushing pressures and searing…...
Ancient supernova remnants found in Antarctic ice
6+ day, 1+ hour ago (954+ words) Earth is quietly collecting fallout from a blast that happened long before humans existed, and a new look at ancient Antarctic ice suggests that material has been riding inside the cloud of gas our Solar System is passing through. That…...