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In the far reaches of our solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, a mysterious and yet-unseen world may be lurking in the darkness. Dubbed “Planet 9,” this hypothetical celestial body has been the subject of intense scientific debate and speculation since its existence was first proposed in 2016. Now, a new study published to the arXiv pre-print service by a team from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d’Azur, and Southwest Research Institute has provided compelling evidence supporting the presence of this enigmatic planet. The origin of the Planet 9 hypothesis stems from the peculiar alignments in the...

Long-term expansion of Mediterranean forests and increase in precipitation as well as an enhanced East Asian summer monsoon associated with the increase and northward migration of the Atlantic moisture source. Paradoxically, the glacial was warmer and wetter than the preceding interglacial. Credit: André Bahr Approximately 700,000 years ago, a "warm ice age" permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded. A European research team including Earth scientists from Heidelberg University used recently acquired geological data in combination with computer simulations to identify this seemingly paradoxical connection.

Artist’s impression of how astronomical forces affect the Earth’s motion, climate, and ice sheets. Credit: NAOJ A team of researchers, including climatologists and an astronomer, has utilized an enhanced computer model to recreate the ice age cycles that occurred between 1.6 and 1.2 million years ago. The findings indicate that the glacial periods were primarily influenced by astronomical forces in quite a different way than it works in the present day. This information will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of ice sheets and the Earth’s climate throughout the past, present, and future. The slow, gradual changes in the Earth’s...

Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets, and asteroids. And each year we're discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home. Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets by 1846. But that doesn't stop us from looking for more. In the past 100 years, we've found smaller distant bodies we call dwarf planets, which is what we now classify Pluto as. The discovery of some of these dwarf planets has given us reason...

As part of the VLA nascent disk and multiplicity survey (VANDAM for short), the researchers mapped the radio waves leaking out of a dense cocoon of dust about 600 light-years away that contained a whole nursery of young stars. The VANDAM survey allowed for a census of stars younger than half a million years old called Class 0 stars – mere babies in star terms – and stars a little older between 500,000 years and 1 million years, called Class 1. Combined with data on the shapes of the surrounding cloud of dust, the scientists found 45 lonely stars, 19...

Highlighted by astronomers at the University of Rochester and the European Southern Observatory, the star — nicknamed “Scholz’s star” — has a very low tangential velocity in the sky, but it has been clocked traveling at a breakneck speed away from us. In other words, from our perspective, Scholz’s star is fleeing the scene of a collision with us. “Most stars this nearby show much larger tangential motion,” said Eric Mamajek, of the University of Rochester. “The small tangential motion and proximity initially indicated that the star was most likely either moving towards a future close encounter with the solar...

The origins of Comet 96P/Machholz (96P) have puzzled scientists for decades since its discovery. It is a four-mile-wide “sungrazer” object with a host of weird properties that suggest it may be an interloper from another star system. For instance, 96P’s composition is extremely unique and its orbit is highly tilted, causing it to pass closer to the Sun than almost any other comet. These features, among others, suggest that 96P may have been rerouted into our solar system by a chance encounter with Jupiter after its voyage across interstellar space. In an ironic twist, however, the comet's interactions with Jupiter...

an image of uranus taken using the keck observatory. The planet appears to glow blue against the darkness, with thin, gossamer rings wrapped vertically around its middle Uranus as imaged by the Keck Observatory. (Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory) Uranus marches to the beat of its own weird little drum. Although it shares many similarities with our Solar System's other ice giant, Neptune, it has a bunch of quirks that are all its own. And one of these is impossible to miss: Its rotational axis is so skewed it may as well be lying down. That's a whopping...

If Uranus was not tilted in one blow, as is commonly thought, but rather was bumped in at least two smaller collisions, there is a much higher probability of seeing its moons orbit in the direction we observe. By European Planetary Science Congress, AAS Division for Planetary Science — Uranus’ highly tilted axis makes it something of an oddball in our solar system. The accepted wisdom is that Uranus was knocked on its side by a single large impact, but new research rewrites our theories of how Uranus became so tilted and also solves fresh mysteries about the position and...

Neptune's own existence was a puzzle until recently. The dusty cloud that gave birth to the planets probably thinned out further from the sun. With building material so scarce, it is hard to understand how Uranus and Neptune, the two outermost planets, managed to get so big. But what if they formed closer in? In 2005, a team of scientists proposed that the giant planets shifted positions in an early upheaval (New Scientist, 25 November 2006, p 40). In this scenario, Uranus and Neptune formed much closer to the sun and migrated outwards, possibly swapping places in the process. That...

What could happen to the earth in the distant future if we don't have the sun to keep us warm anymore or allow plants to grow. 9 minutes 45 seconds long.

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — Uranus is a lopsided oddity, the only planet to spin on its side. Scientists now think they know how it got that way: It was pushed over by a rock at least twice as big as Earth.</p>

<p>Uranus is a lopsided oddity, the only planet to spin on its side. Scientists now think they know how it got that way: It was pushed over by a rock at least twice as big as Earth.</p> <p>Detailed computer simulations show that an enormous rock crashed into the seventh planet from the sun, said Durham University astronomy researcher Jacob Kegerreis, who presented his analysis at a large earth and space science conference this month.</p>

The researchers report that they were studying the planet's rings, which are collectively called Eta, and discovered that they had an oddly shaped orbit -- not round or even circular. Instead, they describe it as sort of triangular. More study showed that the odd orbit of the rings was due to gravitational pull from Cressida -- one of the planet's moons. The gravitational impact is exaggerated, they note, due to the moon keeping pace with the orbit of the planet. The particles in the ring, on the other hand, move faster than the moon. This results in the moon tugging...

Although planets surround stars in the galaxy, how they form remains a subject of debate. Despite the wealth of worlds in our own solar system, scientists still aren't certain how planets are built. Currently, two theories are duking it out for the role of champion. The first and most widely accepted, core accretion, works well with the formation of the terrestrial planets but has problems with giant planets such as Uranus. The second, the disk instability method, may account for the creation of giant planets. "What separates the ice giants from the gas giants is their formation history: during...

Bursts of solar winds caused a huge sparkling region on Uranus, scientists observed this by using Hubble space telescope. Electrons that come from various origins such as solar winds, the planetary ionosphere and moon volcanism, when charged in the form of streams caused this, researchers from the Paris Observatory used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe this on Uranus. They were able to catch it in powerful magnetic fields and, controlled it into the upper atmosphere, where set off spectacular bursts of light when made interactions with gas particles, such as oxygen or nitrogen.

It’s impossible to do an article about Uranus without opening up the back door to a spit storm of potty humour.... Anyway, perhaps one of the strangest aspects of Uranus is its tilt.... The Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees away from the Sun’s equator. Mars is 25 degrees, and even Mercury is 2.1 degrees tilted.... Uranus is 97.8 degrees... ...[A]stronomers define the angle as greater than 90 degrees when you take its direction of rotation into account. When you describe it as turning in the same direction as the rest of the planets in the Solar System, then you have...

BOSTON—The number of Earth-like extrasolar planets suitable for harboring advanced life could be 10 times higher than has been assumed until now, according to a new modeling study. The finding contradicts the prevailing notion that a terrestrial planet needs a large moon to stabilize the orientation of its axis and, hence, its climate. In 1993, French mathematicians Jacques Laskar and Philippe Robutel showed that Earth’s large moon has a stabilizing effect on our planet’s climate. Without the moon, gravitational perturbations from other planets, notably nearby Venus and massive Jupiter, would greatly disturb Earth’s axial tilt, with vast consequences for the...

One of the big questions in solar physics is why the Sun's activity follows a regular cycle of 11 years. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), an independent German research institute, now present new findings, indicating that the tidal forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter influence the solar magnetic field, thus governing the solar cycle.

Back in 2006, the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona noticed that a mysterious body had begun orbiting the Earth. This object had a spectrum that was remarkably similar to the titanium white paint used on Saturn V rocket stages and, indeed, a number of rocket stages are known to orbit the Sun close to Earth. But this was not an object of ours. Instead, 2006 RH120, as it became known, turned out to be a tiny asteroid just a few metres across--a natural satellite like the Moon. It was captured by Earth's gravity in September 2006 and orbited us...