comments feedEurope, Japan send spacecraft on 7-year journey to Mercury AP From Decca Chronicle ESA says the 1.3 billion-euro (USD 1.5 billion) mission is one of the most challenging in its history. European and Japanese space agencies said an Ariane 5 rocket successfully lifted a spacecraft carrying two probes into orbit Saturday for a joint mission […]
NASA’s high-powered planet hunting satellite is now searching for alien worlds
July 31, 2018 by Leave a Comment
By Mike Wehner From BGR Way back in April, NASA finally managed to launch TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. TESS is the latest weapon in NASA’s arsenal that is built specifically to search for planets outside of our own Solar System, and it’s an incredibly powerful device. About a month after it launch, TESS […]
Incredibly rude nearby star system is firing particles at Earth like a ‘cosmic ray gun’
July 5, 2018 by Leave a Comment
By Mike Wehner From BGR Our Sun is obviously the most intense place in our Solar System, but it’s actually pretty chill when compared to many other systems. Eta Carinae, for example, is a binary star system that sits around 7,500 light years from Earth, and it’s so incredibly extreme that when it fires cosmic […]
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our Solar System were born from a few now-dead planetsbean Court of Justice
July 3, 2018 by Leave a Comment
By Mike Wehner From BGR It’s tempting to imagine that the asteroids that litter our Solar System have been there from the start, circling the Sun for ages while the planets formed, but new research suggests that things simply didn’t play out that way. They weren’t just transient collections of dusty and debris that happened […]
This unbelievable image of Jupiter’s cloud belts makes me want to move there
January 23, 2018 by Leave a Comment
By Chris Mills From BGR Jupiter is, scientifically speaking, not great for humans. The gravitational pull is about 2.4 times that of Earth, and its atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium. Even within our own Solar System, there are much better candidates for sustaining life, even including some of Jupiter’s own moons. But from space, […]
Something very weird is happening on Saturn’s moon Titan
November 26, 2017 by Leave a Comment
By Mike Wehner From BGR Thanks to the efforts of NASA and its incredibly reliable Cassini spacecraft, we now know more about Saturn and its moons than ever before, but it seems there are still some surprises in store for scientists studying the planet and its natural satellites. New research by scientists at the University […]
Astronomers spot lava-covered “Super Earth” that might somehow have an atmosphere
November 19, 2017 by Leave a Comment
By Mike Wehner From BGR Exoplanets — that is, planets we know exist outside of our own Solar System — come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities. Some are super frigid, while others are boiling hot, and a few fall somewhere in between. A newly-discovered world called “55 Cancri e” is not the kind of […]
Some insane people think this weird triangle is a crashed alien ship on Mars
November 15, 2017 by Leave a Comment
By Mike Wehner From BGR Mars is one of the most studied and scrutinized of all the planets in our Solar System, and space agencies have sent probes, orbiters, and rovers to investigate it in unprecedented detail in recent years. Mankind has never found anything suggesting that life was once present on its surface, or […]
Dwarf star
September 3, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Dwarf star’s atmosphere holds the ingredients for life By Jon Fingas From engadget It hints that the conditions for life could be more common than you think. One of the biggest questions in the search for life in the universe is a simple one: how common are the ingredients needed to make life-giving planets? They […]
NASA’s smallsat missions
August 7, 2017 by Leave a Comment
NASA picks 10 smallsat missions to explore the Solar System By Mariella Moon From engadget Bigger isn’t always better when it comes to space exploration. Some missions don’t require big spacecraft to accomplish. Take for example, these 10 projects under NASA’s Planetary Science Deep Space SmallSat Studies (PSDS3) program. The agency picked 10 projects from […]
