By modeling the waves produced by a massive, ancient impact, scientists have begun to unlock the secrets of Pluto’s interior.
Planetary interiors
Posted inEditors' Highlights
The Freshest Mineral Water in the Solar System
The water-rich plumes erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus show the chemical signs of water-rock interactions deep within the moon, further implicating Enceladus as a potential habitat for life.
Posted inNews
Massive Collision Cracked Young Jupiter’s Core
The gas giant’s interior reveals evidence of an ancient impact.
Posted inNews
Webb Telescope May Detect Minerals from Shredded Worlds
The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope should be able to measure the composition of vaporizing exoplanets, giving clues about the makeup of their cores, mantles, and crusts.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Searching for Signs of Marsquakes
Researchers use high-resolution images of Mars’s surface to look for signals of coseismic displacement.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
How Did Venus Get its Youthful Surface?
Catastrophic lithospheric recycling is unlikely to be the cause of Venus’s young surface from mantle convection models constrained by offset between the center of mass and center of shape of planet.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Time, Tides, and Wandering Poles
Models of Neptune’s moon Triton reveal curious behavior in how tidal forces and mass anomalies cause the poles to reorient their location.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Close Encounter with Jupiter
First results from the Juno mission shed new light on Jupiter’s atmosphere, gravity, magnetic field, aurora, history, and more.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Martian Mantle Models Pave the Way for NASA's InSight Lander
The most detailed simulations to date of how heat flows through Mars's interior are good news for the upcoming lander and will help scientists interpret its data.
Posted inNews
Freezing Mars's Core—in the Lab
Mars's core, widely thought to be at least partially molten, may eventually solidify completely, and researchers have turned to lab experiments to find out how.