https://phys.org/space-news/planetary-sciences en-us Planetary science and exoplanets exploration news stories and features from Phys.org A Chinese rover has found new evidence to support the theory that Mars was once home to a vast ocean, including tracing some ancient coastline where water may once have lapped, a study said Thursday. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-chinese-rover-evidence-ancient-martian.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 07 Nov 2024 14:56:32 EST news650213785 Scientists have developed a new method to compute how tides affect the interiors of planets and moons. Importantly, the new study looks at the effects of body tides on objects that don't have a perfectly spherical interior structure, which is an assumption of most previous models. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-spectral-method-tidal-effects-planet.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Thu, 07 Nov 2024 14:08:02 EST news650210881 Tiny grains from a distant asteroid are revealing clues to the magnetic forces that shaped the far reaches of the solar system more than 4.6 billion years ago. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-asteroid-grains-outer-solar.html Astronomy Planetary Sciences Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:14:04 EST news650117641 A trio of geologists and environmental scientists from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Minnesota has found evidence suggesting that the Haasttse-baad Tessera formation on Venus was likely formed due to two large impacts early in the planet's history. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-venus-haasttse-baad-tessera-formation.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:02 EST news650019008 On a cold, ancient Mars, rivers flowed and a lake the size of the Mediterranean Sea swelled under the protection of thick ice ceilings, according to new research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-carbon-dioxide-collapse-icy-mars.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:55:26 EST news649936521 In the 1997 movie "Contact," adapted from Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, the lead character scientist Ellie Arroway (played by actor Jodi Foster) takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the star—but no obvious planets are visible. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-hubble-webb-probe-smooth-disk.html Astronomy Planetary Sciences Fri, 01 Nov 2024 12:48:03 EDT news649684081 The key to unlocking the secrets of distant planets starts right here on Earth. Researchers at Tohoku University, the University of Tokyo, and Hokkaido University have developed a model that considers various atmospheric chemical reactions to estimate how the atmosphere—and the first signs of life—evolved on Earth. The study is published in Astrobiology. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-life-began-earth-ancient-atmosphere.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Wed, 30 Oct 2024 09:19:04 EDT news649498742 Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable, and if so, when. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-mars-habitable-thought.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Tue, 29 Oct 2024 15:51:04 EDT news649435862 A new study suggests Uranus' moon Miranda may harbor a water ocean beneath its surface, a finding that would challenge many assumptions about the moon's history and composition and could put it in the company of the few select worlds in our solar system with potentially life-sustaining environments. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-uranus-moon-miranda-ocean-beneath.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 29 Oct 2024 11:10:07 EDT news649419001 Newborn stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust within which planets are born, known as protoplanetary disks. In the Orion Nebula, the brightest and most massive stars emit intense ultraviolet radiation that illuminates protoplanetary disks, allowing them to be photographed in unusual detail. The striking images of these UV-illuminated protoplanetary disks, called proplyds, were one of the first major discoveries by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope decades ago. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-nasa-telescopes-brown-dwarf-protoplanetary.html Astronomy Planetary Sciences Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:48:12 EDT news649349289 Astronomers from the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) in Australia and elsewhere have reinvestigated a planetary system known as HD 28185, known to contain a gaseous giant exoplanet and an outer companion, believed to be a brown dwarf. They found that the supposed brown dwarf is a massive super-Jovian planet. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-hd-brown-dwarf-massive-planet.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:10:06 EDT news649328235 Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is the only place other than Earth known to have an atmosphere and liquids in the form of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface. Because of its extremely cold temperature, the liquids on Titan are made of hydrocarbons like methane and ethane, and the surface is made of solid water ice. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-saturn-moon-titan-insulating-methane.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 25 Oct 2024 10:58:11 EDT news649072681 Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy roughly 200,000 light-years from Earth, lies the young star cluster NGC 602. The local environment of this cluster is a close analog of what existed in the early universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-webb-candidates-young-brown-dwarfs.html Astronomy Planetary Sciences Wed, 23 Oct 2024 13:08:43 EDT news648907717 Since its launch in late 2021, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has raised the possibility that we could detect signs of life on exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-rocky-planets-orbiting-small-stars.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Wed, 23 Oct 2024 11:14:03 EDT news648900841 During May 2024, a series of eruption events on the sun saw the largest geomagnetic storm hit Earth in two decades. The largest since the solar storms of Halloween 2003, it occurred from May 10 to May 13, producing aurorae as far south as the Canary Islands off Africa, the Florida Keys in the United States, and the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. On the other side of the world, the Aurora australis was seen in Queensland, Australia, Namibia and southern Brazil, among many other places. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-super-geomagnetic-storm-current-space.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 22 Oct 2024 10:10:01 EDT news648810351 Billions of years ago, long before anything resembling life as we know it existed, meteorites frequently pummeled the planet. One such space rock crashed down about 3.26 billion years ago, and even today, it's revealing secrets about Earth's past. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-giant-meteorite-impact-billion-years.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Mon, 21 Oct 2024 15:21:21 EDT news648742875 A Southwest Research Institute researcher collaborated with a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to attempt to explain the presence of mysterious flow features that exist on the surfaces of airless celestial bodies, such as the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, explored recently by the NASA Dawn mission, or Jupiter's moon Europa, which will soon be explored in detail by the NASA Europa Clipper mission that includes SwRI's involvement. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-experimental-insights-mysterious-features-airless.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 21 Oct 2024 11:47:03 EDT news648730021 Samples collected from the surface of the moon by the crew of Apollo 16 more than 50 years ago have helped scientists reconstruct billions of years of lunar history. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-capsule-lunar-samples-link-moon.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:49:40 EDT news648722969 While actual evidence for life on Mars has never been found, a new NASA study proposes microbes could find a potential home beneath frozen water on the planet's surface. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-life-mars-ice-possibilities.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:20:04 EDT news648390001 Astronomers report the detection of a second exoplanet orbiting a G-type star known as TIC 393818343, located some 300 light years away. The newfound alien world is about three times less massive than Jupiter. The finding was detailed in a research paper published October 9 on the pre-print server arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-exoplanet-orbiting-early-star.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 17 Oct 2024 09:50:01 EDT news648376677 Encircling Earth are the Van Allen radiation belts—vast, doughnut-shaped rings of highly energetic charged particles, mostly originating from the sun, that are trapped by our planet's magnetic field, or magnetosphere. The belts prevent dangerous radiation from reaching Earth's atmosphere, but can also pose hazards to nearby spacecraft. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-audible-storm-turbocharge-earth-belts.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 16 Oct 2024 14:43:48 EDT news648308622 Scientists believe they could have pinpointed the age of the largest and oldest impact basin on the moon to more than 4.32 billion years ago. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-scientists-date-moon-oldest-impact.html Astronomy Planetary Sciences Wed, 16 Oct 2024 11:34:08 EDT news648297244 An international team led by three researchers from the CNRS, the European Southern Observatory (ESO, Europe), and Charles University (Czech Republic) has successfully demonstrated that 70% of all known meteorite falls originate from just three young asteroid families. These families were produced by three recent collisions that occurred in the main asteroid belt 5.8, 7.5, and about 40 million years ago. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-cosmic-meteorites-asteroid-families.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 16 Oct 2024 11:00:02 EDT news648291613 Hundreds of papers have been written about the first known brown dwarf, Gliese 229B, since its discovery by Caltech researchers at the Institute's Palomar Observatory in 1995. But a pressing mystery has persisted about this orb: It is too dim for its mass. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-twins-mystery-famed-brown-dwarf.html Astronomy Planetary Sciences Wed, 16 Oct 2024 11:00:02 EDT news648289740 October's supermoon is the closest of the year and it's teaming up with a comet for a rare stargazing two-for-one. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-october-supermoon-pairs-comet-special.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 16 Oct 2024 10:06:19 EDT news648291975 Scientists at the SETI Institute and partners from Penn State University used the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to search for signs of alien technology in the TRAPPIST-1 star system. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-scientists-allen-telescope-array-radio.html Astrobiology Planetary Sciences Wed, 16 Oct 2024 10:00:01 EDT news648289779 The OSIRIS-REx project made history last year as the first U.S. mission to bring back an asteroid sample from space—and with it came a treasure trove of data. An international collaboration, led by Sandia National Laboratories and including researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has published a study in The Planetary Science Journal that reveals the preliminary findings from the capsule's reentry. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-asteroid-sample-mission-enables-largest.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 14 Oct 2024 16:12:02 EDT news648141121 NASA's Europa Clipper probe blasted off from Florida on Monday, bound for an icy moon of Jupiter to discover whether it has the ingredients to support life. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-nasa-probe-europa-clipper-jupiter.html Space Exploration Planetary Sciences Mon, 14 Oct 2024 14:44:52 EDT news648135884 Like Earth, Mars was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, but its early surface was very different than today's. Mars' surface then had high rates of meteorite and asteroid impacts from the period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. But whereas today's Mars is cold, arid, has two icy poles, with an oxidizing atmosphere—where, for example, iron-rich materials develop rust—early Mars was characterized by icy highlands, episodic warmth and a reducing atmosphere. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-atmospheric-oxidation-creation-modern-mars.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 14 Oct 2024 10:20:02 EDT news648119357 A small international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has confirmed that asteroid 2019 UO14 is a Trojan asteroid of Saturn. The team has posted a paper describing their study of the asteroid on the arXiv preprint server. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-saturn-trojan-asteroid.html Astronomy Planetary Sciences Mon, 14 Oct 2024 10:03:09 EDT news648118973