Comets and Meteors

A Southwest Research Institute-led team has modeled the early impact history of Venus to explain how Earth's sister planet has maintained a youthful surface despite lacking plate tectonics. The team compared the early collision histories of…

In an unprecedented achievement, citizen scientists have set a new record for the SETI Institute and Unistellar, comprising the highest number of observers providing data on a single event. Amateur astronomers participating in the SETI…

How close can a rocky planet be to a star, and still sustain water and life? A recently discovered exoplanet may be key to solving that mystery. "Super-Earth" LP 890-9c (also named SPECULOOS-2c) is providing important insights about…

The Sun's strong, dynamic magnetic field can catapult huge jets of plasma known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) out into the solar system. Sometimes these hit Earth, where they can knock out power grids and damage satellites. Scientists…

The fastest winds ever recorded on Earth reached more than 200 miles per hour, but even those gusts pale in comparison to the sun's wind. In a paper published June 7, 2023 in the journal Nature, a team of researchers used data from NASA's…

Akshay Suresh, a graduate student at Cornell University, spearheads an extraordinary scientific endeavor -- a groundbreaking mission to uncover periodic signals emanating from the core of the Milky Way called the Breakthrough Listen…

Astronomers have discovered a supernova exhibiting unprecedented rebrightening at millimeter wavelengths, providing an intermediate case between two types of supernovae: those of solitary stars and those in close-binary systems. Many…

Soil on the moon contains active compounds that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and fuels, scientists in China report May 5 in the journal Joule. They are now exploring whether lunar resources can be used to facilitate human…

As the scientific community searches for worlds orbiting nearby stars that could potentially harbor life, new Southwest Research Institute-led research suggests that younger rocky exoplanets are more likely to support temperate, Earth-like…

Europa is a prime candidate for life in our solar system, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades. But it's enclosed by an icy shell that could be miles to tens of miles thick, making sampling it a daunting…