Outer Planets
Outer Planets
1,180 articles in this category.
Outer Planets
The bright nitrogen ice plain forming the left lobe of Pluto's heart has not a single impact crater anywhere on it, which tells planetary scientists the surface is being churned from below and completely replaced on a cycle short enough that parts of that ground are younger than our own species
Outer Planets
For all its serene blue beauty from afar, Uranus hides a detail that would make a visitor recoil: its cloud tops are laced with hydrogen sulfide, the very gas that gives rotten eggs their stench, so Uranus literally reeks
Outer Planets
Uranus is tipped so far over it does not spin like other planets so much as roll around the Sun, and the result is brutal: each pole spends about 42 years in continuous sunlight, then roughly 42 years in unbroken darkness
Outer Planets
At least six moons in our solar system are thought to hide oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces — and the list may keep growing as old spacecraft data, improved models and new missions reveal oceans in increasingly unexpected places
Outer Planets
Jupiter's moon Europa hides a saltwater ocean that may contain more than twice the water of all Earth's oceans combined, yet a new measurement puts 29 kilometres of solid ice above it, a barrier taller than three Mount Everests stacked end to end
Outer Planets
How does a moon 1.4 billion kilometres from the Sun end up with rivers, rain and lakes, but not a single drop of water in any of them?
Outer Planets
We tend to imagine the habitable zone as a narrow ring around a star, but icy moons have transformed that picture. Far beyond the reach of life-sustaining sunlight, vast oceans may remain liquid beneath their frozen surfaces—warmed by the constant gravitational flexing of the giant planets they orbit.
Outer Planets
Scientists think at least two of Uranus's moons — Titania and Oberon — may harbour liquid water oceans beneath their icy crusts, kept warm not by the sun but by radioactive decay deep in their interiors. If true, they join a growing list of ocean worlds in the solar system
Outer Planets
How does a planet 4.5 billion kilometres from the Sun, where daylight is roughly 900 times dimmer than on Earth, whip up the fastest winds in the entire solar system?
Outer Planets
In March 1982, the Soviet Venera 13 lander survived 127 minutes on the surface of Venus at roughly 457 degrees Celsius and 89 atmospheres of pressure, drilling and analysing a soil sample while transmitting the first colour photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet
Outer Planets
Beneath Europa’s fractured ice may be an ocean containing more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined, kept warm in complete darkness by the gravitational pull of Jupiter
Outer Planets
Juno survives repeated dives through Jupiter’s lethal radiation belts by hiding its electronic brain inside a 180-kilogram titanium vault — because an ordinary spacecraft computer would quickly fail in the storm of high-energy particles
Outer Planets
Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is sealed beneath a shell of ice, but the ocean hidden below may contain twice as much liquid water as every ocean on Earth combined — and Jupiter’s gravity may have kept it liquid for billions of years
Outer Planets
The discovery at the Solar System's frozen edge that deepened a long-running astronomical puzzle, casting new doubt on 'Planet Nine' — the giant, unseen world some astronomers believe is quietly tugging at the most distant orbits
Outer Planets