Tag: solar system

  • Nation & World

    Pluto in detail

    Scott Kenyon offers an astrophysicist’s view of the New Horizons mission to Pluto.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Delving into dark matter

    Harvard physicists have suggested that a disk of dark matter may lie along the center line of the galaxy.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Water worlds surface

    Astronomers have found a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone — the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Alien world is blacker than coal

    Imagine a giant world like Jupiter, but more alien than any planet in our solar system. Instead of displaying gleaming clouds colored white and salmon, this world is darker than the blackest lump of coal. It glows only with a feeble red light like a stove’s electric burner — the result of scorching heat from…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Light fantastic

    New research shows that aurorae on distant “hot Jupiters” could be 100 to 1,000 times brighter than Earth’s aurorae. “I’d love to get a reservation on a tour to see these aurorae,” said lead author Ofer Cohen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Solar eruption seen in detail

    On April 9, the sun erupted and blasted a bubble of hot, ionized gas into the solar system. The eruption was observed in unprecedented detail by a fleet of spacecraft, revealing new features that are predicted by computer models but difficult to see in practice.

    2 minutes