Space & Planetary

Last February a team of astronomers reported detecting an afterglow from a mysterious event called a fast radio burst, which would pinpoint the precise position of the burst's origin, a longstanding goal in studies of these mysterious events.

The most detailed map of a small, rocky ‘super Earth’ to date reveals a planet almost completely covered by lava, with a molten ‘hot’ side and solid ‘cool’ side.

A new explanation of how gypsum forms may change the way we process this important building material, as well as allow us to interpret past water availability on other planets such as Mars. The work is reported in Nature Communications*.

A new study published today in Nature reports discovery of a rare event -- that Earth's moon slowly moved from its original axis roughly 3 billion years ago.

The discovery was made by an analysis of three published and two unpublished cuneiform tablets from the British Museum by Prof. Mathieu Ossendrijver, historian of science of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

The moon was formed by a violent, head-on collision between the early Earth and a "planetary embryo" called Theia approximately 100 million years after the Earth formed, UCLA geochemists and colleagues report.

Phenomenally durable crystals called zircons are used to date some of the earliest and most dramatic cataclysms of the solar system.

We have heard the Mars exploration mantra for more than a decade: follow the water. In a new paper published in the journal Science, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team presents recent results of its quest to not just follow the water but to understand where it came from, and how long it lasted on the surface of Mars so long ago.

When a star collapses forming a black hole, a space-time singularity is created wherein the laws of Physics no longer work.

The search for life beyond Earth is one of the grandest endeavors in the history of humankind -- a quest that could transform our understanding of our universe both scientifically and spiritually.

A study published in Scientific Reports-Nature puts forward a new explanation for the Martian megafloods: enormous discharges of subterranean water that dug out the biggest flood channels in the solar system over 3000 million years ago.

An international team led by researchers at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich observed massive dead galaxies in the universe 4 billion years after the Big Bang with the Subaru Telescope's Multi-Object InfraRed Camera and Spectrograph (MOIRCS).

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have found traces of two enormous meteorite impacts in the Swedish county of Jämtland, a twin strike that occurred around 460 million years ago.

Researchers at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Queen's University in Canada have unraveled the mystery of how Jupiter and Saturn likely formed. This discovery, which changes our view of how all planets might have formed, will be published in the Aug. 20 issue of Nature.

A new study shown that meteorite impacts on ancient oceans may have created nucleobases and amino acids.