Universe Today
New Lunar Crater Offers Keys To Moon’s Shallow Subsurface
Asteroids which strike the Moon and create new craters offer lunar scientists a window onto the workings of our natural satellite’s shallow subsurface.
Planetary Science
The study of planets and moons
Recent Articles
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3I/ATLAS Has An Extreme Taste For Heavy Water
More and more details about 3I/ATLAS are filtering through the scientific process as time goes on. Our third known interstellar visitor attracted the attention of some of the most powerful observatories in the world when it was discovered in July 2025, and some of those telescopes found something peculiar - the isotopes it contained appeared different. A new paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and available in pre-print on arXiv) by Kenji Furuya of the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute in Japan and his co-authors, shows how that isotopic discrepancy is likely due to the “low-metallicity” of the stellar nursery 3I/ATLAS was born in.
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Smashed Icy Moons Cool Too Rapidly to Retain Oceans
There are more than 450 confirmed moons orbiting the eight major planets, but only a handful of them provide unique scientific value to pique the interests of the scientific community, specifically their potential for hosting life as we know it. This is due to the subsurface oceans that exist beneath icy crusts, including Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s Enceladus. But what processes are responsible for producing these subsurface oceans, or potentially preventing them from forming in the first place?
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Scientists Release Details About Moon's New Massive Crater
It's easy to think of the Moon as the static constant companion in the night sky. Its face hasn’t visibly changed in millennia, and always faces us with the same side. But looks can be deceiving, as our closest companion is constantly bombarded by asteroids and comets that make small craters across the lunar landscape. While they might not be large enough for us to see with our naked eye, professional Moon watchers can pick up on them. And a recent paper published in Science Advances, describes the largest ever found in modern times.
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Earth's Center of Mass Drifts Less Than We Thought
Earth's center of mass isn't stationary. It drifts seasonally and over the course of years. A new study measures this down to the scale of millimeters and finds the seasonal drift is smaller than we thought.
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The Red Planet Has a Purple Side
Mars appears red because of iron oxides in the regolith. But it's not uniformly red. Different lighting conditions and different materials accumulated on the surface can make it appear purple, as in these images from Mars Express and its High-Resolution Stereo Camera.
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Mercury is Shrinking, But Faster Than Previously Thought
The rough, impact-debris-covered surface of Mercury has hidden the true rate at which Mercury has been shrinking, which scientists previously underestimated by 30%
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For Trans-Neptunian Objects, The Past Is Written On Their Surface
Some Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) formed closer to the Sun and migrated to the outer solar system, while others formed there originally. A new study finds that "hot" and "cold" origin TNOs can be distinguished not only by their orbits, but also by their surface color.
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Saturn's South Pole Features Newly Formed Atmospheric Decagon
The planet Saturn is arguably the most recognizable planetary object in the entire solar system because of its massive rings. Anytime a child is asked what their favorite planet is, the answer is often “The one with the rings!” But, while Saturn’s rings are its most striking feature, the famed planet has a myriad of other unique features that often get overlooked, specifically its polar activity. This includes a long-known rotating hexagon in its north polar region, but what kinds of activity could be occurring in Saturn’s southern polar region, and what could this teach scientists about planetary formation and evolution?
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If Venus Had An Ancient Moon, It Was Doomed
Earth has a big beautiful Moon, while Venus, its 'sister planet', doesn't. Why is that? Did it ever have one? If it did, new research shows it was never going to last very long.
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Don't Get Your Hopes Up for a City on the Moon
Bezos said we should move heavy industry to the Moon. Musk says we'll have sustainable lunar cities. We know there's ancient water ice in craters on the Moon's poles, but there's not enough water to support a city.
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Venus Moon Would Have Been Doomed From The Start, Says New Paper
Venus likely never had a moon and even if it did, it would have soon been torn asunder by the planet’s own gravity, says prominent planetary astrophysicist.
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What's Carving Active Gullies on Mars? It's Not Water
Scientists were shocked when they received the first images of Martian gullies. They were even more shocked as those gullies appeared to change over time. Their similarities to gullies seen on Earth were uncanny, but all of Earth’s gullies are formed by the water run-off, and Martian is too cold and has too sparse an atmosphere to have liquid water on its surface. Whatever has been causing those changing gullies couldn’t have been water, so what was it? A new paper from Apolline Leclef of the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale at Université Paris-Saclay and her colleagues, available in pre-print on arXiv, shows how they are likely caused by CO2 frost turning into a fluid.
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A New Surface Atlas of Phobos Will Help JAXA's MMX Mission Collect its Samples
JAXA's Martian Moon eXploration (MMX) will be on its way to Mars and Phobos next month. It will collect samples from Phobos and return them to Earth. A new morphodynamic atlas of the small moon will help scientists collect and understand the samples.
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Icy Exocomets Around a Distant Star Help Explain Earth's Water
Did icy comets deliver water to the young Earth? That idea won't go away. Now, astronomers at Lund University in Sweden have found evidence of exocomets orbiting a young star named PDS 70. The observations suggest that these comets are delivering water to that system's inner regions.
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Scientists Are Still Trying To Understand How the Moon Formed
The Earth and the Moon have nearly identical isotopic compositions, and the Giant Impact Hypothesis strives to explain this. New research into the ancient impact shows how the temperature of both worlds, and how it affects the strength of the materials involved in the collision, shaped the outcome, including the isotopic compositions.
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New Research Shows How Mercury's Crust Formed by Extreme Volcanism
Researchers have figured out how to use lunar samples to determine the nature of volcanic activity on ancient Mercury. It's all based on SiO2, or silicon dioxide. Its abundance in a planet's crust reveals a lot about magma and volcanic activity.
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Is a Sea Change Coming for New Horizons Heliospheric Science?
If you visit the New Horizons mission website frequently, you'll notice that the spacecraft continues to generate excellent science as it plows its way through the Kuiper Belt. It recently woke up from its latest hibernation period in good health and is transmitting data it gathered back to Earth. The spacecraft, in addition to studying the Jupiter system in 2007, the Pluto system in 2015, and the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth in early 2019, has been doing some other fascinating solar system science since then thanks to two mission extensions in 2016 and 2023. Now, as a result of budget cuts at NASA, an important part of the NH science mission could end as early as October of this year.
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Mars's Interior is 400°C Hotter Under Southern Hemisphere
The planet Mars is a cold and dry world completely devoid of life, but billions of years ago things were much different. This is when Mars had a much warmer interior than it does today, resulting in active volcanism that replenished its atmosphere, a magnetic field that protected the planet from harmful solar and cosmic radiation, and a surface of flowing liquid water. But due to Mars’s small size, the interior cooled far faster than Earth’s has cooled, leading to a loss of volcanism, near-absolute depletion of its magnetic field, and complete evaporation of all surface liquid water. But what is the interior heat of Mars like today?
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7-stage journey reveals how falling space rocks survive air
At least once in our lives, we’ve all seen a bright streak of light briefly blaze across the sky and have quickly referred to it as an asteroid, meteor, shooting star, comet, or some other whimsical name we’ve heard others use to describe it. For those calling it a meteor, you would be correct, but we’ll touch upon this later. The time it takes for a space rock, bolide being its scientific name, to travel through Earth's atmosphere and crash into the ground literally takes only a few seconds. But what happens to a space rock during this very brief travel time, and how can scientists use this to learn about a specific space rock’s origin and the potential damage it could cause if it explodes in mid-air?