Deep in the ice giants, methane is thought to break apart and the freed carbon crystallise into diamond that sinks toward the core. In 2017 a team at SLAC recreated the key step in the lab. The evidence, and why it is a strong case rather than a sighting.
HD 189733b is a deep cobalt blue, the first exoplanet to have its visible colour measured (Hubble, 2013). But the blue comes from silicate hazes, not oceans, in an atmosphere above 1,000C with winds near 7,000 km/h. Same colour as Earth, opposite cause.
Venus spins once every 243 Earth days, longer than its 225-day year, and backwards. But sunrise to sunrise takes only about 117 Earth days, because the orbital motion and slow retrograde spin pull against each other. And through its opaque clouds, a sunrise is really a slow, diffuse glow.
When NASA's Parker Solar Probe passed through the solar corona during perihelion encounters at the heliospheric current sheet, its instruments recorded…
Cassini found Enceladus venting its hidden salty ocean into space, complete with organics, hydrogen pointing to hydrothermal vents, and phosphorus. Modelling suggests the ocean could be long-lived and warm. But habitable conditions are not the same as life, and the ocean's age is still debated.
The color was an afterthought to a study of cosmic light. When color scientists spotted a mistake in the software's white point, the universe's average shade slid from turquoise to a milky beige, and the astronomers owned the error in public.
Arecibo radar found bright polar patches on Mercury in 1991; MESSENGER confirmed water ice in 2012 through three converging measurements. The reason ice survives on the hottest planet is geometry: a near-zero axial tilt leaves crater floors in permanent shadow at about minus 170C.
Two Goethe University physicists have found a solution to Einstein's equations in which a collapsing star spawns an expanding speck of dark energy that halts its own ruin, producing a black hole lookalike with neither a singularity nor an event horizon. The catch: it only works under finely tuned conditions.
Webb launched with 344 single points of failure, most tied to a deployment that could not be repaired at L2. It cleared them all. Today it runs on about one kilowatt, less than many kettles, kept cold passively by its sunshield, a million miles from Earth.
Relativity Space has reached orbit exactly zero times. Its only rocket flew once, in March 2023, climbed cleanly through the hardest part of the atmosphere, and then a second-stage engine quit and the vehicle fell into the Atlantic a few minutes after liftoff.
The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Victoria in 1969, holds presolar silicon carbide grains. A 2020 study dated them by cosmic-ray exposure: most formed shortly before the Sun, the oldest about 7 billion years ago. How the dating works, and why 7 billion is the extreme, not the average.
