February 2016
How to Build Planets
... dust traps (or vortices) that could play an important role in the formation of planetesimals and planets at large radii. Building planets The building blocks of planet formation start with tiny dust grains, that include components such as graphite...
March 2016
Saving Earth from an Expanding Sun
... effect that erased its oceans and left a desert planet, coated with dense clouds of sulphuric acid and an... Still, like me, you’d probably hanker to do something to help the planet that’s been so kind (and patient) with us. I have some emotional...
August 2018
Exoplanet census promises radical discoveries
... tens or hundreds of millions of stars are monitored, the precise alignment demonstrated in Figure 2 occurs frequently. As the foreground planet-hosting star passes in front of the background star, it begins to bend the light from the background star...
August 2018
Measuring the pulse of Mars
...to live up to its name by investigating the red planet like no other mission has done before it. NASA’s InSight...are of immense scientific interest as they help scientists to scan the planet’s interior in a similar way that an x-ray reveals the insides...
November 2018
BepiColombo – a mission to explore Mercury
...Mercury is also a key laboratory for surface-bounded exospheres where, as the name implies, the boundary of a planet’s exosphere is the planet’s surface. In the case of Mercury, the density of its exosphere is too low for molecules to behave as a gas...
22 February 2016
Researchers constrain a possible location for Planet 9 using Cassini data
...Caltech researchers provided the most compelling evidence yet that Planet X or Planet 9 as it has been nicknamed, resides in a... observed by the smaller objects. A predicted consequence of Planet Nine is that a second set of confined objects should...
