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...in the heart of Paris, scientists have uncovered 50 graves in an ancient necropolis which offer a rare glimpse of life in the French capital's precursor Lutetia nearly 2,000 years ago.Somehow the buried necropolis was never stumbled upon during multiple road works over the years, as well as the construction of the Port-Royal station on the historic Left Bank in the 1970s.However, plans for a new exit for the train station prompted an archaeological excavation...The "Saint Jacques" necropolis, the largest burial site in the Gallo–Roman town of Lutetia, was previously partially excavated in the 1800s.However, only objects considered precious were...

hen NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, researchers hoped that its data would help them unravel some of the dwarf planet's mysteries. Instead, the discoveries made during the close-up look at Pluto and its moon Charon revealed more questions that needed answering. One of the big revelations from the flyby was the discovery of an ocean beneath the icy shell encapsulating Pluto. The ice shell was thin in a spot near the equator that's about the size of Texas, known as Sputnik Planitia, which helped researchers notice Pluto's odd topography and suggest the ocean's existence. But this...

Pluto is a dwarf planet. A dwarf planet travels around, or orbits, the sun just like other planets. But it is much smaller. Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. He was an astronomer from the United States. An astronomer is a scientist who studies stars and other objects in space. Venetia Burney named Pluto that same year. She was an 11-year-old girl from England. Pluto is not very big. It is only half as wide as the United States. Pluto is smaller than Earth's moon. This dwarf planet takes 248 Earth years to go around the sun. If you lived...

If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party of astrophysicists and don't know what to say, try this: "But what about the angular momentum?" No matter what the topic of conversation, you'll be guaranteed to sound erudite. Nearly every field of astronomy, from galaxy formation to star formation, has an "angular momentum problem." Nothing in the cosmos ever seems to spin or orbit at the rate it should. The moon is no exception. It is the flywheel to end all flywheels; if its orbital angular momentum were transferred to Earth's axial rotation, our planet would come close to spinning ...

Marking the anniversary of New Horizons’ historic flight through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015, NASA released high-resolution natural-color images of Pluto and Charon. These color images result from refined calibration of data gathered by New Horizons’ Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC).The processing creates images that would approximate the colors that the human eye would perceive, bringing them closer to ‘true color’ than the images released near the encounter.The image of Pluto was taken as New Horizons zipped toward the dwarf planet and its moons on July 14, 2015, from a range of 22,025 miles (35,445 km).The striking features...

Discovered in June 2005, Pluto’s outermost moon Hydra is thought to have formed four billion years ago during a massive impact event that created Pluto and Charon. Despite its age, this 31-mile-wide moon appeared remarkably clean and bright in New Horizons images during the spacecraft’s historic close pass through the Pluto system in July 2015. Scientists’ initial speculation was proved right when data from the spacecraft was analyzed and revealed that Hydra, like its name [??], is covered in nearly pure water ice. Measured with the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) on New Horizons’ Ralph instrument, the spectral signature...

The science team leading NASA’s New Horizons mission that unveiled the true nature of Pluto’s long hidden looks during the history making maiden close encounter last July, have published a fresh global map that offers the sharpest and most spectacular glimpse yet of the mysterious, icy world. The newly updated global Pluto map is comprised of all the highest resolution images transmitted back to Earth thus far and provides the best perspective to date. Click on the lead image above to enjoy Pluto revealed at its finest thus far. Click on this link to view the highest resolution version. Prior...

Explanation: Given some poetic license, there is now scientific evidence that hell has frozen over. To start, Greek mythology holds that Charon is the ferryman of the underworld. Next, recent analysis of data taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft that shot past Charon -- the namesake that is the largest moon of Pluto -- in July now indicates that the cause of the huge chasm that runs across the 1200-km moon was that a huge internal sea froze. And since water expands when it freezes, the already hardened outer crust could not contain it and cracked. To better picture...

Explanation: What do the moons of Pluto look like? Before a decade ago, only the largest moon Charon was known, but never imaged. As the robotic New Horizons spacecraft was prepared and launched, other moons were identified on Hubble images but remained only specks of light. Finally, this past summer, New Horizons swept right past Pluto, photographed Pluto and Charon in detail, and took the best images of Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra that it could. The featured image composite shows the results -- each moon is seen to have a distinct shape, while underlying complexity is only hinted. Even...

Explanation: What would it look like to fly past Pluto? The robotic New Horizons spacecraft did just this in late July and continues to return stunning pictures of the dwarf planet. Some well-chosen flyby images have now been digitally sequenced to create the featured video. The animation begins by showing New Horizon's approach to the Pluto system, with Pluto and its largest moon Charon orbiting a common center of mass. As the spacecraft bears down on Pluto uniquely, surprising surface features are nearly resolved that, unfortunately, quickly rotate out of view. New Horizons then passes just above and near a...

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent incredible images of Pluto’s largest moon Charon back to Earth. The latest images reveal the moon’s complex and violent history, according to NASA. “Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more,” explained the space agency, in a statement. The high-resolution images, which were taken on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon’s equator. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and...

Charon: Moon of Pluto A darkened and mysterious north polar region informally known as Mordor Macula caps this premier high-resolution portrait of Charon, Pluto's largest moon. Captured by New Horizons near its closest approach on July 14, the image data was transmitted to Earth on September 21. The combined blue, red, and infrared data is processed to enhance colors, following variations in surface properties with a resolution of about 2.9 kilometers (1.8 miles). In fact, Charon is 1,214 kilometers (754 miles) across, about 1/10th the size of planet Earth but a whopping 1/2 the diameter of Pluto itself. That makes...

Explanation: A darkened and mysterious north polar region informally known as Mordor Macula caps this premier high-resolution portrait of Charon, Pluto's largest moon. Captured by New Horizons near its closest approach on July 14, the image data was transmitted to Earth on September 21. The combined blue, red, and infrared data is processed to enhance colors, following variations in surface properties with a resolution of about 2.9 kilometers (1.8 miles). In fact, Charon is 1,214 kilometers (754 miles) across, about 1/10th the size of planet Earth but a whopping 1/2 the diameter of Pluto itself. That makes it the largest...

A man in England went exploring with a metal detector and made the discovery of a lifetime: an exquisitely preserved Roman-era grave filled with artifacts, including bronze jugs, mosaic glassware, coins and hobnails from a pair of shoes, all dating to about A.D. 200. The grave likely belonged to a wealthy individual, said Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, the archaeology and outreach officer for the North Hertfordshire District Council. Once Fitzpatrick-Matthews and his colleagues located the grave, they also found evidence of a nearby building, likely a shrine or temple, attached to a villa. The man with the metal detector, Phil Kirk, found...

Buddy, can you spare 16 seconds? Bjorn Jonsson, a 3D computer graphics expert, used publicly available photos on the New Horizon’s website to create a zippy flyby of Pluto that gets you in and out in just seconds. But hold on! If you use the pause button, you’ll see something amazing — Pluto’s dark backside illuminated by sunlight reflecting off its largest moon Charon. Even at Pluto’s enormous distance from the sun of over 3 billion miles, enough sunlight falls on its 750-mile-wide moon Charon to provide a faint illumination on one hemisphere of the dwarf planet. The ring you see around Pluto...

Explanation: These two detailed, true color images of Pluto were captured during the historic New Horizons flyby last month. With slightly different perspectives on the now recognizeable surface features they are presented in this first high quality stereo pair intended for viewing by denizens of planet Earth. The left hand image (left eye) is a mosaic recorded when the spacecraft was about 450,000 kilometers from Pluto. The right single image was acquired earlier, a last full look before the spacecraft's closest approach. Despite a difference in resolution, the pair combine for a stunning 3D perception of the distant, underworldly terrain....

Four naming themes were selected for Charon’s features, three of which are based on fiction — Fictional Explorers and Travelers, Fictional Origins and Destinations, Fictional Vessels — and one on Exploration Authors, Artists and Directors. Pluto’s features, in contrast, are named for both real people and places as well as mythological beings of underworld mythology. Clyde Tombaugh, the dwarf world’s discoverer, takes center stage, with his name appropriately spanning 990 miles (1,590 km) of frozen terrain nicknamed the “heart of Pluto”. Perhaps the most intriguing region of Pluto, it’s home to what appear to be glaciers of nitrogen ice still...

Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this sharper global view of Pluto. (The lower right edge of Pluto in this view currently lacks high-resolution color coverage.) The images, taken when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) away from Pluto, show features as small as 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers). That’s twice the resolution of the single-image view captured on July 13 and revealed at the approximate time of New Horizons’ July 14 closest approach. Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Nix looks like a strawberry-flavored jelly bean, but that reddish region with its vaguely bulls-eye shape hints at a possible crater on this 26 miles (42 km) long by 22 miles (36 km) wide moon. Hydra, which measures 34 x 25 miles (55 x 40 km), displays two large craters, one tilted to face the Sun (top) and the other almost fully in shadow. Differences in brightness across Hydra suggest differences in surface composition. Now we’ve seen three of Pluto’ family of five satellites. Expect images of Pluto’s most recently discovered moons, Styx and Kerberos, to be transmitted to Earth...

Pluto’s icy mountains have company. NASA’s New Horizons mission has discovered a new, apparently less lofty mountain range on the lower-left edge of Pluto’s best known feature, the bright, heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Regio (Tombaugh Region). These newly-discovered frozen peaks are estimated to be one-half mile to one mile (1-1.5 kilometers) high, about the same height as the United States’ Appalachian Mountains. The Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains) discovered by New Horizons on July 15 more closely approximate the height of the taller Rocky Mountains. The new range is just west of the region within Pluto’s heart called Sputnik Planum...