Scientists find evidence for several Earth axis shifts during the age of dinosaurs
A new study finds evidence that Earth may have undergone several episodes of rapid true polar wander during…
Scientists recreate Enceladus’s ocean and watch Earth microbes thrive
Laboratory experiments show that a methane-producing archaeon from Earth can grow under simulated Enceladus seafloor conditions at pH…
Rainstorms billions of years ago may have created habitable hotspots on Mars
A new global model suggests ancient Mars did not receive prebiotic formaldehyde evenly. Rainfall and atmospheric water vapor…
Scientists Thought Mars’s North Polar Ice Was 25% Dust. They Were Way Off
When NASA’s Mars Phoenix mission successfully sampled ice from the Martian arctic regions, it made astrobiological history. This…
New evidence challenges the idea that Earth and Mars formed the same way
Earth and Mars may have formed through surprisingly different mixtures of pebble accretion, planetesimal collisions and giant impacts,…
South Africa’s MeerKAT array detects the first radio signal directly from an exoplanet
Astronomers report the first radio emission directly localized to a confirmed exoplanet, the young giant Beta Pictoris b,…
NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater
It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter…
The Moon may have formed almost intact within hours of Theia smashing into Earth
New simulations of the Moon-forming giant impact show that treating the early Earth and Theia as realistic geological…
Our Sun Might Actually Be a Planet Killer
Stellar evolution can be really chaotic, so it’s no surprise that a planet or two—or more—gets sucked into…
Sea salt may have made Snowball Earth far colder than previously thought
Salt crystals left behind on extremely cold tropical sea ice may have reflected as much as 93% of…
JWST detected an icy world beyond Jupiter transforming into a comet
JWST detected carbon dioxide gas around the active Centaur 450P/LONEOS while finding no detectable water-vapor or carbon-monoxide emission,…
Tidal forces may have doomed an ancient moon around Venus
A hypothetical moon around early Venus could initially have migrated outward, only for tidal evolution to reverse its…