Do planets make diamonds from methane?
Lara Benedetti and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Missouri and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory sealed liquid methane between two diamond ‘...
The mystery of Neptune’s rings
Neptune’s ring arcs were first observed by the Voyager spacecraft in 1984. In the absence of some external source of stability the rings would have been expected to decay within a matter of mont...
Magnetic mystery on Mars
Geophysicists realised that the Earth’s crust consisted of a series of tectonic plates when they noticed that as magma flowed out of the ocean ridges and cooled, iron in the magma magnetized in ...
Read article: World’s most expensive sundial
World’s most expensive sundial
The aluminium sundial features rings representing the orbits of Mars and Earth, and red and blue dots showing the position of the two planets at the time of the landing. Once safely installed on Mars,...
Multi-planet system startles astronomers
Upsilon Andromedae is a yellow G-type star similar to the Sun. In 1996 Geoffrey Marcy from San Francisco State University, together with Butler, discovered one planet by observing a ‘wobble̵...
Solar system is chaotic
Murray and Holman ran numerical simulations of the planets positions over a 200 million year period using their new technique. They discovered that although the outer planets appear in stable orbits, ...
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...
