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Want to take a road trip through our solar system? Warm up your Volvo and point yourself toward Stockholm, where a 950-km scale model of the solar system begins. You can tour Sweden while getting a sense of our solar neighborhood's scale. More »
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NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, has spent the last four years exploring the very edge of our solar system, where giant magnetic bubbles repel incoming charged particles while neutral ones stream in on their way to the Sun. More »
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Astronomical, the latest project by artist Mishka Henner, is an entire scale model of the Sun and the nine traditional planets...and absolutely nothing else. As you can see in the video below, it's one giant reminder of cosmic emptiness. More »
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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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A few months back, astronomers discovered a diamond planet formed from the remnants of an exploded star. It looked like a cosmic oddity, but giant diamond-encrusted planets might be way more common than we ever suspected. More »
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We recently discovered the first direct evidence of comets bringing water to alien planets, and now we can go one step further. The planetary disk around the star TW Hydrae has enough water in it to support thousands of oceans. More »
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The Eta Corvi solar system is like a window into how our own solar system looked billions of years ago. All of Eta Corvi is being bombarded by giant comets — the exact same process that created Earth's oceans. More »
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What costs a billion euros, can operate in temperatures in excess of 500 degrees celsius, and orbits the sun closer than any spacecraft in human history? More »
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This solar system just doesn't work. According to a new computer simulation, the planets could never have come together in their current configuration. The only explanation is that we once had a fifth gas giant...and it's still out there somewhere. More »
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We've just learned that there's strong evidence that saltwater flows on the surface of Mars. It's another reminder that water is everywhere in our solar system, whether it's ice, vapor, or liquid. Here's a handy guide to where all the water can be found. More »
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Comets will occasionally come a little too close to the Sun and crash into a fiery oblivion, but until now we had never been able to see it as it happened (though there have been some fake comet-smashes-the-sun videos circulating online). Witness the last moments of a sun-grazer comet. Blink and you may miss it - look at the photo below to see where the comet enters the frame. More »
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July 11, 2011 marks the first full orbit of the planet Neptune since its discovery on the night of September 23-24, 1846. The discovery of Neptune is a fascinating story, full of near misses and the triumph of math. More »
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Located just 4.3 light-years away, the Alpha Centauri star system is our closest neighbor. But theirs is a very different solar system, as it's home with not one, not two, but three stars. Here's the short guide to Alpha Centauri. More »
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Mars is about half Earth's size and only a tenth its mass, which doesn't make sense. By rights, Mars should be as big as Earth and Venus. Now we know why Mars is small...it's because Jupiter is a big bully. More »
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As we learn more about far distant solar systems, it becomes clear just how weird the universe really is. And, more disconcertingly, how unusual our own solar system is. And that starts with our curious lack of so-called "hot Neptunes." More »
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The moon Io is home to over 400 active volcanoes, making it the most geologically active place in the solar system. And in this image created from the Galileo probe, you can see two huge volcanoes erupting from the surface. More »
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The most recently discovered mineral is krotite, which was recently discovered in a meteorite fragment. Krotite has never been seen in nature before now, and yet its origins reach right back to the birth of the solar system. More »
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Vesta is the asteroid belt's second largest object, but figuring out what it is has driven astronomers crazy. Is it an asteroid? A planet, perhaps a protoplanet? Whatever the answer, Vesta might just be the solar system's most important object. More »
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The Interstellar Boundary Explorer discovered a stange barrier of energy and particles that surrounds the solar system. Recently scientists have isolated the ribbon of energy, but questions remain. More »
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Feast your eyes on some of the solar system's earliest materials: the pink core comprises melilite, spinel and perovskite. The multi-colored rim contains hibonite, perovskite, spinel, melilite/sodalite, pyroxene, and olivine. More »
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There were many reasons why Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet status, one of which was that it couldn't clear its orbit of asteroids and other debris. But Earth's orbit is also crowded...too crowded for Earth to be a planet? 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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Our view of the Solar System has changed utterly in the last fifty years. Mention that at a cocktail party and your listener will assume you're talking about Pluto, the demotion of which has stirred more response than any other recent planetary news. But in addition to all we've learned through our spacecraft, our view of the Solar System has gone from a small number of orbiting planets to huge numbers of objects at vast distances. Fifty years ago, a Kuiper Belt many times more massive than the main asteroid belt was only theory. And the early Solar System models I grew up with never included any representation of a vast cloud of comets all the way out to 50,000 AU. More »
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Webcomic Quantum Vibe starts with a bad week. Nicole is dumped by her boyfriend, fired from her job, and broke. It all brings her to her oddest of odd jobs: assisting a famous scientist as he travels the Solar System. More »
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The great challenge for any climber is to conquer each continent's tallest mountain. But tomorrow's climbers can consider a far more extreme challenge: leaving Earth to climb the tallest peaks of the solar system. Here's how they'll do it. More »
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Long after the last human has died off, most robots continue to perform the functions for which they were built. But sometimes an illegal bohemian chip sends a robot in search of more, across the Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life. More »
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A distant solar system that centers on the star HD 10180 has at least 5 planets, and most likely two more. It's possibly the most populous solar system we've spotted, other than our own. And it's pretty weird. More »
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An ancient meteorite reveals the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old, 1.9 million years older than we thought. The difference seems insignificant, but it could mean our solar system was actually born in the blast furnace of a supernova. More »
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At the bottom of a crater on Mars, these dunes are covered in sheets of dry ice. As sand blows across the top of the ice, the sheets break up and blow apart, creating these streaks and lozenges. More »
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Have trouble keeping track of the nearly 200 past and current missions to explore our solar system and beyond? National Geographic's elegant infographic displays 50 years of space exploration in a colorful map of our planetary neighbors. 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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This is a picture of Jupiter's moon Io floating over the planet's clouds, to remind you how freaking huge Jupiter is. Io is the same size as our own moon. To celebrate the battle of Jupiter's Red Spots, in which the original Daddy Red seems to be in the process of eating the other two, the Boston Globe posted a set of the greatest Jupiter photos of all time, from NASA. Click through for a few of our favorites, including some truly spooky views of Europa and Io. [Boston Globe via A Second Hand Conjecture] More »
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More than 30 years ago, we launched two space craft on a long-shot, once in a lifetime mission to explore the outer planets. Today, the Voyager space probes are still making their long, lonely journeys outside the boundaries of our solar system. Amazingly, they are still functioning and still sending us data about the things they encounter. Now we know what the edge of the solar system looks like, but where will the Voyagers end up? More »
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Since 1960 we've been attempting to explore the red planet, and along the way there have been countless failures and lost spacecraft that attest to just how hard it is to fly those 35 million miles from here to there. However, there have also been success stories, like the twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit, who have both overcome mechanical problems, braved dust storms, and sent back enormous amounts of data. Today, after being threatened with a shutdown due to budget cuts, the Martian rovers got a reprieve. They'll be rolling along for many months to come. To celebrate, check out our list of Martian robots and landers who have already served their robotic duty as our slaves, erm we mean allies, on the red planet. More »
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The Academy's shortlist for visual effects awards hit the web yesterday, and Sunshine isn't anywhere to be found. If you want to see why this is such a travesty, then head out and pick up a copy on DVD today. We know all of you didn't see it, and it flew under the radar for a lot of people out there, so we'll wait here patiently while you pick one up or add it to the old Netflix queue. Or you can click through to see our analysis of how special effects in the actual nominees compare to the stunning Sunshine. More »
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Newly-discovered x-ray jets literally blanket the face of the sun, launching continent-sized blobs of superhot gas outwards at 200 million miles per hour. Which is just about 5% of the speed of light, and makes us second-think the chances a spaceship like the one in Danny Boyle's Sunshine might have of getting close to that sucker, even for a quick flyby. More »
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The relatively benign Comet Holmes, besides having a cool, superfly name, erupted a few weeks ago in a spectacular stellar event which has caused the scientific community to go "oooh" and "aaah." Since then, it's been growing steadily larger, and now dwarfs even our own Sun in sheer size. Do you need to stock up on sunblock and start digging that bomb shelter? More »
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