One ring became more opaque, and the other became more translucent. Astronomers don’t know why.
solar system
Posted inNews
Venusian Sulfur Clouds Might Not Be So Inhospitable After All
New research shows that peptides can fold into “omega loops” linked to biological functions, even in highly acidic environments.
Posted inResearch & Developments
Scientists Might Have Detected the First Moon Outside Our Solar System… It Just Depends How You Define “Moon.”
What exactly is a moon? It’s an existential question lunar researchers found themselves pondering when they discovered an exosatellite at least 90% the size of Jupiter, orbiting a brown dwarf in a solar system about 73 light-years away from Earth.
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Oddball Moon Might Be a Neptune Original After All
Infrared observations of Nereid hint that it might have formed in orbit around Neptune, unlike most of the planet’s other satellites.
Posted inNews
Asteroid Hosts All Ingredients for DNA and RNA
Samples collected from asteroid Ryugu contain the four genetic “letters” of DNA, reinforcing the hypothesis that the chemical origins of life were present when the solar system began.
Posted inNews
Titanic Shake-Up Could Explain Saturn’s Young Rings and Strange Moons
A new model shows how the migration of Titan could have destroyed another moon, creating Saturn’s rings and the moon Hyperion. And, the model suggests, this all happened in the past billion years.
Posted inFeatures
Small, Faint, or Fast, Rubin Will Find It
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is set to redraw the map of the solar system by discovering millions of small, fast-moving objects hidden all around us.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
ALMA’s New View of the Solar System
High-resolution radio observations link the chemistry of local moons and comets to the birth environments of distant exoplanets.
Posted inNews
Could Future Mars Habitats Be Made of Ice?
Models suggest that clear ice, sourced and distilled on Mars, could offer a feasible alternative for building stable off-world structures.