Faint sunlight enough to drive weather, clouds on Saturn’s moon Titan
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, can seem like Earth viewed through a
funhouse mirror. Far colder than our home, water on the surface exists
only in a frozen state, while its liquid lakes and clouds are made of
methane,...
Figuring out why most of Titan’s methane lakes have northern exposures
Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most intriguing bodies in our solar system. Its dense atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane make it both beautiful and bizarre, as well as a tantalizing target for...
The quasicrystal that fell to Earth
The 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Dan Schechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals, materials that do not have the regular lattice structure of crystalline solids. Schechtman produced quasicrystals in the la...
Kepler-20′s oddball planet assortment challenges models of planet formation
NASA's press conference on the newly discovered Earth-sized planets has just concluded, and most of the time was spent reiterating what was in our earlier report. Most of the value of listening in came...
Kepler team spots Earth-sized planets orbiting sun-like star
Just two weeks after the confirmation of a planet that's within the habitable zone of a distant star, the Kepler team is back with the discovery of two Earth-sized planets orbiting in what is now...
Gypsum deposit on Mars provides definitive evidence of water
The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity is on its way to the red planet, scheduled for a landing in August. In the meantime, the Opportunity rover, which has been operating for nearly eight years, is...
Improved dating process upsets timeline of Moon formation
Some scientific progress is made by developing new concepts, and some is made by throwing monkey wrenches into existing ideas. A letter published today in Nature looks like an instance of the latter.
It's pretty well...
Orbiter spots possible water seepage on surface of Mars
Over the last several decades, evidence has piled up that Mars once played host to liquid water on its surface. But in its current geological era, the red planet is too cold and has...
Lunar orbiters find most recent volcanos on dark side of the Moon
The Earth's moon was formed by a collision between two separate bodies early in the history of the solar system. That collision left the Moon completely molten, and provided it with both a large...
Greenhouse effect may give exoplanet liquid water
Although our catalog of exoplanets is expanding rapidly, researchers are still looking for one that can unequivocally play host to liquid water on its surface. Over the past several years, attention has focused on the collecti...
Jupiter’s moon Io may have a molten core, mantle
Subsurface oceans may be a common features of the moons of our solar system's gas giants. Evidence has piled up that there's one on Titan, and data from Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede that...
Atmosphere’s worth of dry ice found at Mars south pole
Currently, Mars has a thin atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide, with pressures at most of the planet's surface so low that liquid water will immediately boil. But a variety of features we've discovered argue...
