Researchers developed a model showing how lava-covered planets close to their stars can hold onto their atmospheres, which could help guide the search for life beyond our solar system. Some planets orbit so close to their stars that intense radiation should strip away their atmospheres. Yet several of these scorching, lava-covered worlds still retain thick [...]After nearly eight years and billions of kilometers of travel, BepiColombo -- a science mission led by ESA in close collaboration with JAXA -- has begun its long-awaited arrival at the smallest and innermost planet in our Solar System.
The post BepiColombo Begins Final Approach to Mercury appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
For almost five decades, Saturn’s north pole has been famous for hosting a bizarre, six-sided jet stream known as the hexagon, a feature first spotted by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s and still churning today.
The post Astronomers Discover Decagonal Wave circling Saturn’s South Pole appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
More than 140 million miles away from Earth, a rare event recently occurred in the twilight skies above Mars, and it was all captured on camera by NASA’s Perseverance rover.
Imagery of a celestial alignment, featuring Earth as it briefly vanished behind the Martian moon Phobos, was revealed in composite photos captured by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument in early July as the intrepid rover embarked on its 1,907th Martian day, or sol, on the Red Planet.
The rover’s Mastcam-Z camera system, developed by Arizona State University in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems, was built for capturing high-resolution panoramic zoom imagery of the Martian landscape. Although its main objectives involve its investigations of Jezero Crater and ancient geological features preserved there for eons, which may even include evidence of past microbial life, cases like the recent celestial alignment showcase how the rover’s cameras can also provide unique insights into astronomical events.
Captured against fading twilight, our Earthly home appears as little more than a tiny, bright speck of light as it slowly passes behind the irregularly shaped Martian moon, in what astronomers refer to as an occultation.
NASA applied processing to the rare images, which helped to filter out some of the background light, revealing the brief celestial pairing in greater detail. The resulting imagery offers a glimpse of a dark backdrop that now better highlights the motion of Earth and Phobos in their treks through the Martian sky.
The image was obtained roughly 40 minutes after the Martian sunset, as the natural orbital path Phobos follows causes it to appear to drift upward in the new sequence of images, while Earth moves diagonally downward, then slips out of view behind the oddly shaped Martian companion.
In an annotated version released by NASA, timestamps spanning just 40 seconds illustrate the progression of the event in single frames, offering a look at a sunset unlike any ever seen on Earth.
That isn’t to say that the same effect can’t be seen from our planet, but in reverse: a lunar occultation where Mars passes behind the Moon can also be observed here, under the right conditions.
Occultations are frequently used by astronomers to help study the positions and motions of various celestial bodies in this way. However, seeing one from the surface of another planet is a rare treat, offering a view of Earth as a distant point of light.
In the past, Perseverance has also captured images of a lunar eclipse from its position on the Martian surface, as Phobos was seen passing in front of the Sun. Past imagery collected by NASA’s robotic explorer has also documented appearances of the Martian moon Deimos in the Red Planet’s early morning skies.
Although Mars’ characteristic rusty hues are ever-present, the recent imagery also offers a glimpse of other subtle colors seen in the Martian environment, particularly at twilight. With subtle bluish grays that gradually transition to redder tones, the new images offer a more nuanced and colorful look at the Red Planet.
Perseverance has now spent more than five years exploring Mars, and its ongoing discoveries have added a wealth of new information to the growing body of knowledge scientists have collected about our nearby planetary neighbor.
As for the recent imagery the rover captured, such a unique view requires careful timing, along with a bit of good fortune, according to Mark Lemmon, a Mastcam-Z co-investigator at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
“Phobos crosses the Martian sky three times a day, and Earth is visible for months at a stretch,” Lemmon said in a statement, adding that “catching one directly behind the other takes planning and a little luck.”
Additional details provided by NASA about the new imagery can be found here and here.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
Planetary researchers analyzing images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have found evidence that liquid nitrogen may still be seeping up from beneath the dwarf planet’s giant glacier, Sputnik Planitia, marking the first suggested case of recently flowing liquid on Pluto’s surface.
The post Liquid Nitrogen May Have Flowed on Pluto’s Surface in Recent Past appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has stumbled on the largest patch of polygon-shaped ground fractures it has ever seen on Mars, a discovery that could reveal more about the planet’s watery past.
The post Curiosity Finds Massive Field of Honeycomb-Shaped Fractures on Mars appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere appears to have begun contracting after years of holding steady, according to a new study published in the Planetary Science Journal.
The post Pluto’s Thin Atmosphere May Be Starting to Shrink appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
NASA’s Curiosity rover continues to uncover unusual polygon-shaped features resembling “honeycombs” on the Red Planet.
The latest images depicting these unique geometric formations, known as polygonal fractures, were revealed this week by NASA, showing the rugged Martian terrain around the Vallee Grande area covered in the unusual-looking features.
In Curiosity’s photos captured by the rover between June 19th and 20th, a sprawling web of the Martian honeycombs could be seen spreading across the terrain in all directions.
Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the mission’s project scientist likened the discovery to a “sea” of Martian polygons that he said took the Curiosity team’s breath away.
“We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes,” Vasavada said in a statement. “We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed.”
According to Vasavada and his colleagues, some of these unique structures appear to have formed from mud cracks, although the polygonal shape appears to occur under a range of different conditions on the Martian terrain.
Among the reasons for their appearance, scientists have determined that temperature changes can cause moisture to be squeezed out of sediment layers, producing the characteristic structured appearance.
Long before Mars became the cold, arid world we see in NASA imagery today, lakes and streams used to exist along the base of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-high mountain that Curiosity has been slowly climbing and studying since 2014. Since beginning its trek, the rover has uncovered chemical traces of the planet’s wetter past, including carbon-based organic molecules considered the precursors to RNA and DNA.
While researchers remain uncertain about whether these compounds are the result of biological processes or simply natural geological conditions, their discovery adds to the mounting evidence for an ancient Mars that once would have held the chemical requirements for life to have once existed there.
Curiosity has discovered these unique polygon-shaped features on several occasions in the past, although NASA mission scientists say they’ve never seen as many in a single location.
One of the recent similar discoveries took the Curiosity team by surprise, as images of the region obtained by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) had not indicated anything unusual about the terrain. Once Curiosity arrived, however, a web of unusual polygon features was revealed in the surrounding terrain.
In another instance in 2025, several areas resembling waffle or honeycomb patterns were spotted by Curiosity’s Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) on May 1, 2025.
Additional details about Curiosity’s ongoing studies of the Martian landscape can be found on NASA’s official Curiosity page.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
A Jupiter-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf could become the first confirmed moon beyond our Solar System. A massive object appears to be circling a brown dwarf in the CD-35 2722 system, but calling it a moon is not straightforward. Unlike moons in our Solar System, it does not orbit a planet. Instead, it travels [...]A £3 million investment could help secure a leading UK role in NASA’s future search for life on nearby planets. An Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star would appear as little more than a dim point beside a light source 10 billion times brighter. British astronomers are preparing technology that could help NASA separate that [...]A giant planet spent more than a decade concealed inside one of astronomy’s most closely watched star systems. Astronomers have discovered a planet named Beta Pictoris d orbiting a young star just 63 light-years from Earth. The gas giant is about 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the first planet found in the system, [...]As companies develop large constellations of orbital data center satellites, experts say now is the time to start thinking about some critical space safety topics and rules of the road.
The post Rules of the road needed for orbital data center constellations appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Chicxulub impact not only plunged Earth into an impact winter but also produced a dust blanket that later overheated the planet, according to new research from Purdue University and the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The post Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Didn’t Just Strike Earth, Its Dust Cloud Cooked It appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
A new look at more than two decades’ worth of archival data from NASA’s Spirit mission suggests that the Martian soil may hold iron-bearing minerals -- hematite and altered magnetite -- that were too faint for scientists to detect in real time during the mission.
The post Hidden Clues in Spirit Rover Data Suggest Mars Once Had Far More Water than Scientists Realized appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have discovered a gas giant around a brown dwarf in the stellar system CD-35 2722.
The post Planetary-Mass Exomoon Found Circling Brown Dwarf appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
This discovery marks a major milestone in the search for life on worlds beyond our solar system. A faint stream of helium escaping from a distant rocky world has revealed something astronomers had never clearly detected before: an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet in another star’s habitable zone. The result is the strongest evidence so [...]The small exoplanets of our Sun’s second-nearest neighbor, Barnard’s Star, are inhospitable wastelands, British astronomers say.
Located six light-years from Earth, Barnard’s Star is separated from our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, by about 66° in our sky. Now, University of Cambridge researchers have revealed their findings on this exosolar system in a recent paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
After careful analysis, the astronomers announced that the exoplanets are unlike any in our solar system, presenting a brutal and barren environment.
Scientists only discovered these four small planets orbiting Barnard’s Star in 2025. Unlike anything in our solar system, these orbital bodies fit into a size range larger than Mars, but smaller than Earth or Venus.
Like a peeled onion, these smaller planets are rich in a mineral only found deep below the Earth’s surface. Chemical analysis revealed large amounts of the mineral periclase on the surface of these planets, something typically only found hundreds of kilometers deep on our planet.
“Barnard’s Star has an enormous amount of the element magnesium compared to other stars, so its planets are likely to be rich in magnesium too,” said lead author Xander Byrne from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “On Earth, that magnesium goes into making minerals called olivines, which are really important for storing water within the planet.”
Unfortunately for those looking for extraterrestrial life, magnesium serves a different purpose on these exoplanets. Instead of water-storing olivine, it produces the abundant periclase, which is a poor store of water.
Even worse, these inhospitable exoplanets likely no longer have an atmosphere. According to the University of Cambridge team, these ten-billion-year-old planets probably only managed to hold an atmosphere for two billion years at most.
“These planets were always going to be hostile, because they’re really close to their star,” said Byrne. “Even the outermost planet orbits ten times closer than Mercury orbits the Sun. When you’re that close to your star, and have such little gravity, your atmosphere just gets blown off.”
In addition to the lack of atmosphere, the planets’ proximity to Barnard’s Star leaves them tidally locked, like our Moon, with one side always facing toward the star.
However, there is one positive element to these small planets. Typically, such close-orbiting systems are highly unstable, with the planets shooting out from the system, falling into their host star, or catastrophically colliding. Yet in this case, the system is as ordered as a piece of music.
The three inner planets of the exosolar system have years in a 9:12:16 ratio, producing two of what is known as a “perfect fourth” in music. This musical harmony is known as an orbital resonance, with the same type of effect stabilizing Jupiter’s moons in their orbits around that planet.
While our ability to view Barnard’s Star from Earth may be limited, the European Space Agency’s upcoming Plato mission may allow astronomers to discover ever smaller worlds orbiting in the nearby exosolar system.
“Larger planets are much easier to detect than small ones, so we know about very few sub-Earth planets like the ones in this system,” said Byrne. “But the sensitivity of these new missions will help to reduce this bias, allowing us to discover more and more planets that are small and rocky, like Earth.”
The true significance of the research may lie in the value of a null result. While these planets are bleakly hostile to life, observing this exosolar system’s composition can aid future astronomers in narrowing down the search for extraterrestrial life.
The paper, “The Barnard’s Star Planetary System: Stability, Composition, and Evolution of Four Sub-Earth Exoplanets,” appeared in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on June 24, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
New 3D computer simulations from ETH Zurich show that young rift flanks on Venus stay tall and steep, while older ones flatten out over time.
The post Giant Rift Valleys Hint Venus is Still Tectonically Active appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Scientists discovered a rare planet larger than Jupiter orbiting a distant star once every 180 days. A planet nearly five times as massive as Jupiter circles a distant star once every 180 days. Known as NGTS-38 b, it is an exoplanet, meaning a world that orbits a star outside our solar system. NGTS-38 b is [...]Webb found a hidden giant planet by detecting its atmospheric chemistry through a bright debris disk. For years, a third giant planet remained concealed within the bright dust surrounding Beta Pictoris, one of the most closely observed planetary systems in the Milky Way. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now exposed the hidden world by [...]
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