Outer Planets
Outer Planets
1,191 articles in this category.
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
Astronomers at Cambridge have proposed that the galaxy may contain a vast and previously unrecognised population of habitable planets, characterised by a global liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen atmosphere, that exist across a far wider range of stellar conditions than Earth-like worlds and that may be substantially easier to detect signs of life on than the Earth analogues that astronomers have been searching for over the past three decades
Outer Planets
There is a planet 63 light-years from Earth where the rain is made of molten glass, the winds blow at 7,000 kilometres per hour, the daytime temperature is over 1,000 degrees Celsius, and the planet itself, viewed from space, is the same deep blue as Earth.
Outer Planets
Simple collapse may build cosmic snowman worlds
Outer Planets
Jupiter size refined by new radio mapping
Outer Planets
Study links Europa's quiet seafloor to hidden potential for life
Outer Planets