Clouds gather on Titan
Titan’s atmosphere has much in common with our own: it consists mainly of nitrogen, contains organic material, and exerts a pressure one-and-a half times what we feel on Earth. But Titan receive...
‘Floating planets’ challenge theorists
Many planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but they are usually detected by observing the wobble of the parent star induced by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. Zapatero ...
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CODAG: watching dust gather
The CODAG experiment recreated for the first time conditions in the early solar system in order to observe the dust clustering process. Micron-sized silicon oxide grains were injected into a chamber f...
Europa: water, water everywhere
The latest evidence comes from an analysis of the magnetic fields surrounding Europa. When a conducting body is placed inside a time-varying magnetic field, electrical currents are induced inside the ...
Read article: Europa: water, water everywhere
Cluster takes shape
The Rumba and Tango satellites were sent into space on board a French-Russia launcher. Over the next week they will rendezvous with the Salsa and Samba satellites that were launched on July 16. The fo...
Surface features on Europa explained?
Gaidos and Nimmo say that the tidal forces from Jupiter can cause regions of ice near a fault or defect to move relative to one another. This relative motion causes frictional heating that increases t...
Literate physicist gets taste for fiction
White Mars is about a group of men and women who are marooned on Mars at the end of the 21st century. Living in enormous self-perpetuating domes, they produce their own food and oxygen, and extract wa...
Asteroid threat over estimated
A collision with a Near-Earth asteroid is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Near-Earth asteroids are usually piles of rock from the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt whose orbit ...
Light glimpsed from extra-solar planet
Light from the planet is almost completely obliterated by the bright glare from the star. Although the reflected signal is 10-20,000 times weaker than the glare from tau Bootis, the planet studied by ...
Eclipse confirms extrasolar planet
According to calculations by Marcy and colleagues, the planet has 63 percent of the mass of Jupiter and orbits the star every 3.5 days. On Thursday, the next time the star is eclipsed, more telescopes...
