10 May 2021
Sun's biggest outburst this cycle is sending solar storms to Earth and Mars
.... Launched in 1995, SOHO has been observing the Sun from an advantage point known as the First Lagrangian Point (L1), where the combined gravity of the Earth and Sun keep SOHO in an orbit locked to the Earth-Sun line. Its LASCO instrument uses a set...
19 October 2018
Countdown begins for the launch of BepiColombo
... two regions that are 180 degrees apart, which always have the Sun directly overhead when the planet is closest to the Sun. If you could stand at these points, then the Sun would appear to be almost stationary overhead for two to three weeks...
17 June 2019
Filling in the gaps of Jupiter-like planet formation
... System eating up leftover gas and dust before eventually settling 5.2 astronomical units (AU) away from the Sun. With a growing collection of ‘hot-Jupiter’ planets being found so close to their host stars in recent years, it did ...
13 September 2019
Newly discovered comet could be our second interstellar visitor
... visitor, as an amateur astronomer has just found what appears to a comet from another star system on a path towards the Sun. This new object - designated C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) - was discovered cruising around three astronomical units (about 450...
19 May 2021
Scientists unexpectedly find heavy metal vapour in comets throughout our Solar System, and beyond
... than 480 million kilometres from the Sun. That is more than three times the Earth-Sun distance. “It was a big surprise to detect iron and nickel atoms in the atmosphere of all the comets we have observed in the last two decades, about 20 of them...
26 November 2021
A closer Moon could have helped the early habitability of our planet
... apparent contradiction between observations of liquid water early in Earth’s history and a low output of the Sun is known as the faint Sun paradox or faint Sun problem. This issue was raised by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Since...
