Solar System

In Dante's Inferno – the first part of The Divine Comedy – the poet describes Hell as a series of nine concentric circles,...

During its final orbits around Saturn, which culminated in a fiery, destructive Grand Finale, Cassini managed to pick up something...

Today marks Earth's aphelion, the point in its orbit when we are farthest from the Sun! If you want to be exact, aphelion occurred...

Like the formation of Earth's Moon, Uranus' radical tilt has been a mystery for decades. The planet is so skewed that its equator sits...

An international cohort of scientists analyzing data from mass spectrometers aboard NASA's Cassini space probe have discovered...

Today, June 27th, 2018, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 closed in on the asteroid Ryugu, where it will aim to collect samples,...

If you're reading this you've probably seen a lunar eclipse before, but as amateur and professional astronomers know, it's not a "seen...

New research into Mars' history may revolutionize our image of the Red Planet, including the ongoing investigation into whether it...

When discussing space travel, there's a reason we typically focus on Mars and less so on Venus — the second planet in our solar...

Scientists have been arguing for decades over whether Mars has (or ever had) liquid water, but the discovery of several lunar...

NASA is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to scientific research: Between the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, the multiple...

The 2015 Dawn mission to explore the dwarf planet Ceres may not have turned up evidence of life, but it did find the next best thing:...

The Juno probe has been orbiting around Jupiter since 2016, and has allowed us to see the gas giant from a whole lot of new angles...

When the Apollo 15 and 17 astronauts landed on the Moon, they discovered something very weird that kicked off a mystery that's lasted...

Despite its enormous size and gaseous composition being completely alien to Earth, at least Jupiter's lightning strikes look familiar...

About 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away, close to the outer edges of our solar system, a quiet space probe has just...

Evidence has been piling up for the existence of a ninth planet in our solar system, but no one has directly observed this supposedly...

For non-astronomers, it's easy to imagine that the edge of the solar system is simply the point where nothing is orbiting around the...

The Dawn spacecraft first made a pass around the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015, and its findings were fascinating enough that NASA...

Dunes on another planet may not seem like an especially important find, but they actually only appear under specific conditions. "Lots...