Atmosphere
We Might Know Why Mars Lost its Magnetic Field
Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It's also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall…
An Exoplanet Reaches 2400 C in One Hemisphere. Does it Really Rain Iron?
WASP-76b is an ultra-hot Jupiter about 640 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Pisces. A few years ago it…
Gliese 486b is a Hellish World With Temperatures Above 700 Kelvin
The CARMENES consortium recently discovered a super-Earth just 21 light-years away that will be the perfect test case for exoplanets…
We Could Find Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Their Air Pollution
Upcoming telescopes will give us more power to search for biosignatures on all the exoplanets we've found. Much of the…
Astronomers Find a Planet Like Jupiter, but It Doesn’t Have any Clouds
Can you picture Jupiter without any observable clouds or haze? It isn't easy since Jupiter's latitudinal cloud bands and its…
Stellar Flares May Not Condemn a Planet’s Habitability
Red dwarf stars are the most common kind of star in our neighbourhood, and probably in the Milky Way. Because…
If a Planet Has a Lot of Methane in its Atmosphere, Life is the Most Likely Cause
The ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope will launch soon. Once it's deployed, and in position at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point…
Mars Might Have Lost its Water Quickly
Mars is an arid place, and aside from a tiny amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, all water exists…
There are Planets So Close to Their Stars That They Have Magma Oceans 100km Deep and Winds that Go 8000 km/h
200 light years away, “super earth” exoplanet K2-141b orbits a star so closely that its "year" is only 7 hours…
Astronomers Challenge Recent Findings About Venus. “No Statistically Significant Detection of Phosphine”
In September, a team of scientists reported finding phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Phosphine can be a biomarker…