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Fifteen observatories across the US, Mexico, and Hawai’i looked at the planet eclipsing a star. Uranus, its rings, and some of its moons as seen by JWST. Image credit: NASA, ESA,CSA, STScI, Joseph DePasqual ************************************************************ On April 7, 2025, star HIP 16271 was occulted by Uranus. As a star, it is by no means famous. A yellow-white star in the constellation of Taurus, not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye given its distance – about 400 light-years away – but bright enough to allow astronomers to look into the atmosphere of Uranus in great detail for the...

An artistic representation of Chiron’s nucleus surrounded by debris and a coma of dust and gas. Credit: William Gonzalez Sierra UCF researchers utilized the James Webb Space Telescope to uncover unique characteristics of (2060) Chiron, a distant “centaur” that exhibits traits of both a comet and an asteroid. These findings provide valuable insights into the origins of our Solar System. Although our Solar System is billions of years old, we’ve only recently gained deeper insight into one of its most dynamic and intriguing members: (2060) Chiron. Chiron belongs to a group of celestial objects known as “Centaurs.” These objects orbit...

Most people consider Saturn's awe-inspiring system of rings that encircle the gas giant to be the most fascinating and iconic celestial feature in our solar system..... A fast-approaching and significant cosmic event will soon dramatically alter our view of this magnificent planet. Come March 2025, Saturn's majestic rings will become virtually invisible to earth-based observers. This phenomenon occurs due to the unique tilt of Saturn's axis, which will position the rings edge-on to our line of sight.... Thankfully, this isn't a permanent change...

Credit: NASA/Dana Berry Here in our own Solar System, a single star anchors the system, where inner, rocky planets, an intermediate-distance asteroid belt, and then more distant gas giant planets eventually give way to the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. This configuration is not universal among stellar and planetary systems, which means our Solar System possesses many properties that are not necessarily common among exoplanetary systems KEY TAKEAWAYS Earth doesn’t have the most water in the Solar System, the farthest planet from the Sun isn’t the coldest, and the only planet made mostly of metal isn’t the densest. Forget...

Since the landmark discovery in 1992 of two planets orbiting a star outside of our Solar System, thousands of new worlds have been added to a rapidly growing list of 'exoplanets' in the Milky Way galaxy. We've learnt many things from this vast catalogue of alien worlds orbiting alien stars. But one small detail stands out like a sore thumb. We've found nothing else out there like our own Solar System. This has led some to conclude that our home star and its brood could be outliers in some way – perhaps the only planetary system of its kind. By...

Stunning new images released by NASA on Monday detailed new images of Uranus, revealing a stunning look at its glowing rings and one rarely seen feature. The photos, taken by NASA’s high-power James Webb Space Telescope, captured the icy planet along with its multiple inner and outer rings, nine of its 27 known moons and a seasonal polar cap. The new pictures offer a rare glimpse of the “elusive” Zeta ring, an extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet — shown in a reddish brown. Multiple other rings were captured in a glowing blue. The Webb telescope also...

This theory is a candidate for most major advance there has ever been in our understanding of human and solar system origins

Using data that's three decades old, NASA scientists say they've figured out what happens to Venus' heat when it's lost to space — and discovered that the planet's surface may be "squishy" enough for it to be hemorrhaging its internal warmth...This Venusian discovery stems from astronomers trying to understand the planet's surface, which unlike Earth does not have tectonic plates to explain where its heat goes.

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...

an illustration of the boundaries of the solar system. The planetary system sits inside a glowing bubble, with a large blue bubble wrapped around it. bright lights resembling comets, possibly representative of cosmic rays, are unable to penetrate An illustration showing the Solar System inside the heliosphere, with the termination shock and heliopause represented by two bubbles, one inside the other. (NASA) The bubble of space encasing the Solar System might be wrinkled, at least sometimes. Data from a spacecraft orbiting Earth has revealed ripple structures in the termination shock and heliopause: shifting regions of space that mark one of...

The Voyager 2 spacecraft is one of the testaments to human ingenuity! More than four decades after launch, the spacecraft continues to function, even in the harshest imaginable condition of deep space! Despite being billions of miles away, the tenacious spacecraft continues to send back amazing and even terrifying discoveries to the mission controllers on earth! One of the discoveries was a huge wall of fire when Voyager 2 crossed the boundary of our solar system! What happens at this boundary, and how do the events at this boundary affect us on the earth? Join us as we dive into...

Explanation: This 180 degree panoramic night skyscape captures our Milky Way Galaxy as it arcs above the horizon on a winter's night in August. Near midnight, the galactic center is close to the zenith with the clear waters of Lake Traful, Neuquen, Argentina, South America, planet Earth below. Zodiacal light, dust reflected sunlight along the Solar System's ecliptic plane, is also visible in the region's very dark night sky. The faint band of light reaches up from the distant snowy peaks toward the galaxy's center. Follow the arc of the Milky Way to the left to find the southern hemisphere...

It has been a busy time for solar activity. Back in March of 2022, Earth was hit by separate geomagnetic storms, according to government weather agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. Though the geomagnetic storms likely didn't cause any harm, they brought into focus the potential harm that could come from more powerful storms in the future. Then earlier this month, a G1-class geomagnetic storm hit the Earth, causing bright auroras over Canada. The only problem is that nobody saw this storm coming until it was quite late. Five days ago, a giant sunspot and filaments on the solar...

A close up of one of the stalagmites analyzed in the study. Credit: Jud Partin When Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Kim Cobb and graduate student Jud Partin wanted to understand the mechanisms that drove the abrupt climate change events that occurred thousands of years ago, they didn't drill for ice cores from the glaciers of Greenland or the icy plains of Antarctica, as is customary for paleoclimatolgists. Instead, they went underground. Growing inside the caves of the tropical Pacific island of Borneo are some of the keys to understanding how the Earth's climate suddenly changed - several times -...

Explanation: Why would the surface of Titan light up with a blinding flash? The reason: a sunglint from liquid seas. Saturn's moon Titan has numerous smooth lakes of methane that, when the angle is right, reflect sunlight as if they were mirrors. Pictured here in false-color, the robotic Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 imaged the cloud-covered Titan in 2014 in different bands of cloud-piercing infrared light. This specular reflection was so bright it saturated one of Cassini's infrared cameras. Although the sunglint was annoying -- it was also useful. The reflecting regions confirm that northern Titan...

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — The final frontier has rarely seemed closer than this — at least virtually. Researchers at one of Switzerland’s top universities are releasing open-source beta software on Tuesday that allows for virtual visits through the cosmos including up to the International Space Station, past the Moon, Saturn or exoplanets, over galaxies and well beyond.... ...VIRUP is accessible to everyone for free — though it does require at least a computer and is best visualized with VR equipment or 3D capabilities.... ...To be sure, VR games and representations already exist...But the EPFL team says VIRUP goes much farther...

Summertime means it’s time to play ball! But what would it be like to play ball on various locations across our Solar System? Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue has put together a fun animation of how quickly an object falls on to the surfaces of places like the Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and Pluto. The animation shows a ball dropping from 1 kilometer to the surface of each object, assuming no air resistance. You can compare, for example, that it takes 2.7 seconds for a ball to drop that distance on the Sun, while it takes 14.3 seconds...

A comet unlike any other in recorded history is on a trajectory to zip through the inner solar system in less than a decade, but like most space rocks that make the news, it isn’t anything to lose sleep over. Comet 2014 UN271 was observed during a mission called the Dark Energy Survey back in 2014, but skywatchers didn’t realize that the data gathered was showing a comet until mid-June of this year. Pedro Bernardelli and Gary Bernstein were the two people who made this realization, giving Comet 2014 UN271 a name that rolls off the tongue a bit easier:...

Astronomers have never directly seen the Oort Cloud and the most distant spacecraft ever launched by humankind – Voyager 1 – is not due to get there for another 300 years. But new research and upcoming space missions are now starting to reveal some of its secrets. The Oort Cloud was first predicted by Jan Oort in 1950 to explain the existence of comets like Neowise. Unlike short-period comets, which usually take less than 200 years to orbit the Sun and come from an icy disk beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, the origin of those with much longer orbits...

Radioactive elements synthesized in massive stars are ejected into space via stellar winds and supernova explosions. Our Solar System moves through the interstellar medium and collects these extrasolar products. One such product is iron-60. Because it is not naturally produced on Earth, the presence of this radioactive isotope is a sensitive indicator of supernova explosions within the last few million years. Australian National University’s Dr. Anton Wallner and colleagues previously found traces of iron-60 at about 2.6 million years ago, and possibly another at around 6 million years ago, suggesting our planet had traveled through fallout clouds from nearby supernovae....