Sunlight moves asteroids
Some asteroids are pulled into near-Earth orbits by gravitational resonance effects created by the combined pulls of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. However, it has been known for many years that another me...
Tectonic plate theory shaken on Mars
Mars is now a dry planet with most of its water either tied up in a deep permafrost or lost to outer space. However, images gathered by Mars Observer and earlier space craft such as the Viking orbiter...
Scientists wobble over Earth’s tilt
Geologists have known for some time that ice sheets existed at the equator between 2, 400 and 2, 200 million years ago and then again between 820 and 550 million years ago. Their favourite theory to e...
Wet weather on Titan
Planetary physicists hope to use atmospheric data from Titan to provide clues to the behaviour of our own atmosphere. The difficulty with studying Earth’s atmosphere is that it is affected by ex...
Astronomers catch ‘planet-mania’
Greaves and colleagues used the SCUBA instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to look at the dust around Epsilon Eridani. SCUBA operates at submillimetre wavelengths, where the glare...
Deep Impact may be more than a movie
The researchers constructed a mathematical representation of the irregularly spaced near Earth asteroid Castalia for their calculations. They assumed it would be made of solid rock, a pair of solid ro...
Has Hubble photographed an extrasolar planet?
Terebey and colleagues believe that the new planet was in orbit around two stars – TMR-1A and -1B – before it was ejected by a gravitational slingshot mechanism. The planet then created a ...
Salty oceans on Europa
Europa is roughly the size of the Moon and is 85% water by weight. An icy crust reflects most of the light falling on the satellite. In 1979, the Voyager spacecraft flew past Europa and discovered a s...
Astronomers see extra-solar planetary debris
Planets are thought to form from the debris surrounding young stars. As material rotates around the star, gravitational attraction causes the debris to clump together into planets. Gradually the plane...
Did the Earth get hit by multiple impacts?
Simon Kelley of the Open University in the UK, John Spray of the University of New Brunswick, and David Rowley of the University of Chicago in the US, reached this startling conclusion while trying to...
