Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Lachlan Brown
Writer at Space Daily

Lachlan Brown

Editor-in-Chief

Lachlan Brown is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media and one of Space Daily's three Co-Publishers. He is Space Daily's Editor-in-Chief and the author of several books on Buddhism, mindfulness, and relationships, and oversees content operations and publishing strategy across the network. At Space Daily, Lachlan focuses on the Mind & Meaning pillar — the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes.

Profile on Brown Brothers Media →

Outer Planets

Titan is wider than Mercury, operates a complete methane weather cycle, and contains hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all Earth’s known oil and gas reserves. It is the only known world beyond Earth where you could stand beneath clouds beside a calm lake—provided you remained sealed inside a heated, oxygenated suit.

Titan is larger across than Mercury and runs a methane weather cycle, but its famous hydrocarbon inventory and walkable pressure both need careful qualifications.

Science

One set of simulations suggests Uranus may have been tipped over by at least two giant impacts rather than one: when researchers modelled a single abrupt collision acting on an existing moon-forming disk, the resulting moons orbited backward. Multiple impacts produced a prograde satellite system aligned with Uranus’s extraordinarily tilted equator—but newer models show that a single impact followed by moon formation remains possible.

A 2012 pre-existing-disk model required an earlier tilt to keep Uranus's moons prograde, while later impact-generated-disk models restore a viable one-collision path.

Marsdaily

Mars lacks Earth’s protective global magnetic field, and a 2026 Boston University-led study revealed one consequence: solar-wind shear generates enormous plasma waves that tear clouds of atmospheric ions into space, with instantaneous fluxes 10–100 times greater than typical steady escape channels. Scientists think such events may have contributed to Mars’s transformation from a wetter, potentially habitable world into today’s frozen desert.

Joint MAVEN and Tianwen-1 observations identify Kelvin-Helmholtz wave packets as a bursty route by which oxygen-bearing ions escape the Martian atmosphere.

Solar Science

The sharpest-ever images of the Sun, published in August 2026, revealed plasma vortices as small as about 20 kilometres across—structures no previous telescope could resolve. They may help twist and transport magnetic energy through the solar atmosphere, potentially contributing to the still-unsolved mystery of why the corona is far hotter than the surface.

Inouye resolved the photosphere at about 19 kilometres and exposed Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices at magnetic boundaries, but their contribution to coronal heating remains to be measured.

Science

When scientists announced Webb’s first definitive detection of Neptune’s auroras in March 2025, they revealed another surprise: observations taken in 2023 showed that the planet’s upper atmosphere had cooled by several hundred degrees since Voyager 2 visited in 1989—and scientists still don’t know exactly why.

Webb's 2023 H3+ spectrum measured Neptune's upper atmosphere at 358 plus or minus 8 kelvin, far below Voyager 2's 1989 estimate, but two snapshots cannot yet explain what drove the change.