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...
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...
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...
January 2018
When it comes to water Mars may not be the promised land
... the fate of the atmosphere and of the water resources of the planet. It has been estimated that 1029 joules of energy released by a... views of many scientists, the water inventory of the planet may not be as much as anticipated. Assuming that ...
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...
19 January 2016
Giant double-planet system around an evolved star detected by astronomers
...also possible that the star might have harboured a third planet that was engulfed as the star expanded, causing the ...their neighbours to cause significant disruption. The number of multi-planet systems found to date, regardless of the central star’s ...
