Latest Solar System Stories

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com NASA unleashed a new analysis of the giant asteroid Vesta on Thursday based on data taken by its Dawn spacecraft. Carol Raymond, Dawn deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that Dawn's success has transformed scientists' perspective of Vesta from a fuzzy form, into a planetary body. She said that the asteroid formed within 2 million years after the first solids formed in the solar system....

[ Watch the Video ] Every second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere, about 60 miles up in the atmosphere. This electromagnetic signature, known as Schumann Resonance, had only been observed from Earth's surface until, in 2011, scientists discovered they could also detect it using NASA's Vector Electric Field...

Shortly after passing Enceladus, Cassini had a non-targeted encounter of Dione. At closest approach, the spacecraft flew within about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) of the moon. Cassini's cameras captured several mosaics during this encounter, including one taken around the time of closest approach that covered a fracture named Latium Chasma at resolutions of about 175 feet (53 meters) per pixel. Other mosaics cover much of Dione's northern hemisphere that faces away from Saturn in its orbit,...

Astrophysicists at a UK university have found a quartet of white dwarf stars which they say are in the process of consuming exoplanets that were once similar in composition to Earth. According to a Thursday press release, researchers from the University of Warwick said that the four stars which they observed were surrounded by dust from shattered planetary bodies. They used the Hubble Space Telescope to survey the chemical composition of those stars' atmospheres, and discovered that the...

Our solar system is four and a half billion years old, but its formation may have occurred over a shorter period of time than we previously thought, says an international team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and universities and laboratories in the US and Japan. Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that tick at different paces, according to how far back one looks. Nuclear clocks, used for dating, are based on...

Penn State University astronomers have discovered record-breaking radio waves from an ultra-cool star that is not much warmer than the planet Jupiter. The team used a giant 1,000-feet radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rica to look for radio signals from a class of objects known as brown dwarfs.  Brown dwarf's bridge the gap between gas giant planets, and hydrogen-fusing stars. The astronomers found that a brown dwarf named J1047+21 that lies 33.6 light years away in the constellation...

Phoebe, one of Saturn’s 60+ moons, has been found to have planet-like properties, NASA scientists discovered while analyzing swarms of data collected and transmitted by the Cassini orbiter. New analysis of images of Phoebe lead scientists to theorize how the 140-mile-in-diameter rock started life. They suggest that it began its life as a planetoid in the Kuiper belt, a much larger version of the asteroid belt that sits on the outer edge of our planetary system. The scientists actually...

WASHINGTON, April 25, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Findings from NASA's Dawn spacecraft reveal new details about the giant asteroid Vesta, including its varied surface composition, sharp temperature changes and clues to its internal structure. The findings were presented today at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria and will help scientists better understand the early solar system and processes that dominated its formation. (Logo:...

Brett Smith for Redorbit.com [ Watch the Video ] Scientists studying images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have found evidence of massive snowballs dragging glittering trails from one of Saturn’s rings. Saturn’s F ring has often been thought to be the most affected of the giant plant’s rings, often changing its look over the course of hours. The orbiting debris field measures a few hundred miles wide and is shepherded around the planet by two moons, Prometheus and...

SEATTLE, April 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Planetary Resources, Inc. announced today its plan to mine Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) for raw materials, ranging from water to precious metals. Through the development of cost-effective exploration technologies, the company is poised to initiate prospecting missions targeting resource-rich asteroids that are easily accessible. To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please click:...