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It's the perfect way to get to know the solar system — with your mouth. Japanese chocolatier L'Eclat is offering this collection of planet truffles, painted beautifully and flavored in the ways you always imagined. More »
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The Cassini mission to Saturn has been bountiful with the gorgeous pictures in the past — including one gorgeous shot that wound up in the last Star Trek movie. But these newly released images of Titan might be the most arresting Cassini pictures yet. More »
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Is there anything more wondrous than art showing interstellar phenomena and dolphins — together? It's like a whole universe of awesome, all in one place. Brandon McConnell's spray-painted art is full of pyramids, galaxies, sunsets, true love and dirt bikes. More »
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Sometimes, things just line up perfectly. Like in this amazing photo of five of Saturn's moons together. This is no composite, this is one photo with five moons in view. You can't actually see Saturn itself, just the planet's rings. More »
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Is this a new Hubble Space Telescope image of a gorgeous exoplanet, or a common household sauce pan? Place your bets now. More »
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The Hubble Space Telescope may be getting old, but it still has excellent spotting power — witness its discovery of a fourth moon of Pluto, which is between 8 miles and 21 miles in diameter. More »
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This photo shows four of the five planets visible to the naked eye, all lined up one on top of the other in the morning sky to create the most impressive planetary configuration in over a decade. More »
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In this week's "Ask a Physicist," we'll explore an awesome mash-up of exoplanets, supercivilizations, and dark matter, and try to figure out whether the "missing mass" in the universe is really advanced aliens with a cloaking device. More »
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If you're trying to get actual images of exoplanets, it helps to look at M-dwarfs, particularly young ones. More »
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Check out this gorgeous Martian vista. This view of the Western Candor Chasma on Mars was created with data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. More »
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This amazing image takes all 1,235 of the candidate planets spotted by NASA's Kepler telescope, and then shows them in orbit around their stars. And all of this is still just the tiniest fraction of the entire Milky Way. More »
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Over the last couple of years, our knowledge of alien worlds has skyrocketed. In this week's "Ask a Physicist," we'll talk about how we find exoplanets and why we might miss a second earth, even if it's right next door. More »
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NASA's Messenger probe is currently orbiting close around the Sun in preparation for its mission to Mercury. While making its lonely orbit, Messenger snapped this amazing photo that shows all the planets (plus our Moon) in one big family photo. More »
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This video starts with the Moon, runs through our solar system's rocky and gas planets, and then takes us from our regular-sized Sun to the biggest hypergiant star, all to a pulse-pounding beat. Prepare for a crash-course in cosmic scale. More »
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This amazing video brings together all 1,236 exoplanet candidates that the Kepler telescope has spotted, and it imagines how they would look all together in a single solar system. All the planets are to scale and in the correct relative positions to their star. Prepare to be blown away by just how crowded our galaxy has gotten. More »
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The six planets you see above are all considerably larger than Earth, and yet five of them orbit their star at a closer distance than Mercury. It's the most ridiculously packed solar system we've ever seen, and our current theories about how planets form are completely unable to explain how they all got there. It's a real exoplanet mystery, and the biggest discovery since we found exoplanets in the first place. More »
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A gigantic exoplanet 63 light-years from Earth is doomed, slowly spiraling into its host star. But it's going out with a bang, funneling orbital enemy into its star and making it spin faster and faster, creative massive magnetic disturbances. More »
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The newly-discovered Kepler-10b is, in terms of size, the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered, and the first completely confirmed discovery of a rocky planet around another star. This is very good news for the hunt for Earth's twin. More »
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Despite being located billions of kilometers away from its host star, the dwarf world formally known as a planet may harbor and interesting secret beneath its icy crust. More »
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The discovery of a fourth gas giant around the star HR 8799 doesn't seem like that big a deal, but it's become the latest flashpoint for a highly controversial and often intense debate about how gas planets are born. More »
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A new study estimates that one in four sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets — far more than previously thought. It challenges current theories on how planets form, and may mean a greater chance of finding habitable worlds. More »
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Today, Neptune's in perfect opposition to the sun, meaning in a straight line with the sun and Earth, and brightest at midnight. It's also at its closest to Earth, and nearing the end of its first orbit since its discovery. More »
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Years of research into Saturn's rings, plus new information from the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around the ringed gas giant, have resulted in a comprehensive new study of the planet. These images are among the most stunning from that study. More »
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A 168-mile-long channel near Mars' Ascraeus Mons volcano wasn't created by water as scientists have previously thought. New high-resolution images suggest that this trench was created by molten lava. What does this mean for the search for water on Mars? More »
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All hail King Kong of Mars! Eagle-eyed experts spotted this gorilla in one of the pictures sent back by the Spirit Rover. Of course, NASA's trying to cover it up. But it's not the weirdest Martian we've found so far. More »
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Saturn put on an incredible once-in-a-blue-moon show for the Hubble Space Telescope — Hubble was able to view the planet when its rings were edge-on, so that the planet's twin aurorae, its northern and southern lights, were visible. More »
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Astrophotographer Tyler Allred took this amazing new image of the Andromeda Galaxy, which just appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune. Today's new space porn also includes Jupiter's shrinking spot, digitally-restored moon pics, and an exoplanet. More »
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Every one of Saturn's rings has had a known moon — except the mysterious "G" ring. Now NASA's Cassini Space Probe has found the planet's 61st satellite. Meanwhile, you've voted for your next space-porn fix. More »
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Looking for an interstellar getaway? Consider a vacation in sunny Epsilon Eridani. Earlier this week, NASA astronomers reported that the nearby solar system looks a lot like our own and could hold Earth-like planets, and maybe even life. Luckily, many science fiction novels have already used this planetary system as a setting, and they offer some thrilling ideas of what you can expect if you make a stop-over there. Here's our travel guide to some of the most exotic Eridani locales from science fiction. More »
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Mars isn't the only planet with awe-inspiring craters. Here on Earth, we've been pummeled by space rocks in the not-so-distant past, and our planet has the scars to prove it. A new photo essay in National Geographic by Stephen Alvarez tells the story of planetary impacts like this one (above) in Arizona, U.S., called simply Meteor Crater. It's almost a mile wide. Check out an even more awesome one below. More »
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Using nothing more than a battery-powered device that emits a beam of ultraviolet light, future robotic explorers will be able to identify the building blocks of life on other planets and moons. A group of scientists in the U.S. and the U.K. have developed a small device which uses a low-power laser beam to sweep over rocks or soil, identifying identify organic substances that are the signposts of life as we know it. Specifically, the little machine "sees" life by causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), often called the earliest form of organic matter in the universe, to light up. The discovery is so promising that it's likely to be launched out with the next generation of Mars rovers. More »
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Vernor Vinge has said that he drew inspiration for the planet of the Tines from a visit to Norway, and Amy Thomson told me recently that she traveled to Mongolia to get a feel for the planet where her recently-finished novel is set. If the otherworldly photographs George Steinmetz recently took in Bolivia are any indication, this cold, arid, beautiful country could easily inspire a novel about life on a terraformed Mars. Here, in the massive salt flats of Uyuni, you can see the pale piles of mineral that miners have chipped from the ground with pickaxes. A very thin layer of water over the salt creates a reflective surface. More uncanny images below. More »
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The Phoenix Lander, our favorite robot chemistry lab on Mars, has successfully cooked up some soil in its oven to see if water evaporates from it when heated. So far, no dice. Though the Martian rovers Opportunity and Spirit have found evidence of evaporated water at the equator of the planet, Phoenix hasn't yet found similar evidence at the pole. What it has found, however, is fascinating. There is an unknown white substance right beneath the surface of the soil next to it (pictured), which could be ice or salt. And the Martian soil has turned out to be chunky, rather than sandy, which surprised scientists. More »
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One of the worst examples of unrealistic science in movies is the overly simple alien planet. Oftentimes, our heroes will visit the desert planet, or the Irish planet. But the best extraterrestrial worlds in science fiction are the ones with variety and a realistic ecosystem. They have cities as well as countryside, and a range of environments. Here's our guide to the most realistic — and interesting — planets in science fiction. More »
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Astronomers have detected organic compounds — but not life — on a planet outside our solar system for the first time. The Jupiter-sized HD189733b, 63 light years away, has methane as well as water vapor, despite its proximity to its sun and atmospheric temperatures of 700 degrees Celsius. There's no way a planet that hot can support life (we think), but then again, you shouldn't be able to find methane at those temperatures either. In any case, the discovery is another step towards being able to analyze the atmospheres of distant planets. Image by Christophe Carreau/ESA. [New Scientist] More »
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A planetary system seems to have survived the death of its star, judging photos released last August from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The Helix Nebula, 700 light years from Earth, is the unraveling remains of a star not unlike our sun. It's also one of the few nebulae to show any evidence of bodies that survived that disaster. More nebula pics, including one that shows battling comets that outlasted the sun's death, after the jump. More »
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