Jupiter is a world of superlatives: the fastest spinner, the most magnetically powerful planet, and home to a storm that has raged for over 350 years. Here's a closer look at the giant next door.
A new 3D, non-equilibrium model of silver atoms in the Sun's atmosphere raises the Sun's measured silver content and nearly closes a decades-old gap with meteorite chemistry.
If Mercury ever applied for a job, its resume would be short on words and long on extremes. Small, fast, and built to survive conditions that would destroy almost anything else, it's the closest planet to the Sun and, in... Continue Reading →
Today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, credited to astrophotographer David Cowland, is a wide, wispy shell of red-glowing gas known as RCW 86. It's a quiet-looking target, but the story behind it stretches back almost two thousand years and... Continue Reading →
Did you know that sunsets on Mars are blue? It sounds backwards for a planet named for its rusty red color, but it comes down to how sunlight scatters through Mars’ thin, dusty atmosphere: fine dust particles scatter red light... Continue Reading →
A rare, favorable tilt of the Moon revealed Mare Orientale, the 'Eastern Sea', along its western edge. The story behind a 3-billion-year-old impact basin and a naming convention that got flipped a century later.
In a dark patch of sky in the constellation Centaurus, a ghostly figure drifts through space, pale blue and curved, vaguely human in silhouette. Astronomers call it the Mermaid Nebula. What it actually is, beneath that delicate appearance, is the... Continue Reading →
The Moon is practically on our doorstep, and yet, after decades of orbital missions and Apollo sample returns, we still don't have a complete chemical map of its surface. A new study published in Earth, Planets and Space proposes an... Continue Reading →
Today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day features the Vela Supernova Remnant — a vast tangle of glowing filaments left by a star that exploded 12,000 years ago, just 800 light-years from Earth. At its heart, a pulsar spins ten times per second.