OUTERPLANETS - SKY NIGHTLY

Jul 30, 2018 (SPX)

The North North Temperate Belt is one of Jupiter's many colorful, swirling cloud bands. Scientists have wondered for decades how deep these bands extend. Gravit...

'Ribbon' wraps up mystery of Jupiter's magnetic equator

Jul 25, 2018 (SPX)

An international team of scientists led by the University of Leicester has identified the weakened ribbon of H3+ emissions near the jovigraphic equator using th...

Radiation Maps of Jupiter's Moon Europa: Key to Future Missions

Jul 24, 2018 (JPL)

Since NASA's Galileo mission yielded strong evidence of a global ocean underneath Europa's icy shell in the 1990s, scientists have considered that moon one of t...

The True Colors of Pluto and Charon

Jul 23, 2018 (SPX)

Marking the anniversary of New Horizons' historic flight through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015, mission scientists have released the most accurate natural c...

Dozen new Jupiter moons declared

Jul 17, 2018 (SPX)

A team led by Carnegie's Scott S. Sheppard first spotted the moons in the spring of 2017 while they were looking for very distant solar system objects as part o...

NASA Juno data indicate another possible volcano on Jupiter moon Io

Jul 16, 2018 (JPL)

"The new Io hotspot JIRAM picked up is about 200 miles (300 kilometers) from the nearest previously mapped hotspot," said Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigato...

First Global Maps of Pluto and Charon from New Horizons Published

Jul 11, 2018 (SPX)

Now, thanks to the efforts of the New Horizons team, the first official validated global map and topographic maps of these two bodies have been published and ar...

Europa's Ocean Ascending

Jul 06, 2018 (JPL)

This is just one of several simulated behaviors reported in a new study performed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The study focused on linear...

Jupiter's moons create uniquely patterned aurora on the gas giant planet

Jul 06, 2018 (SPX)

The stunning phenomenon of aurorae - beautiful colorful tendrils above the atmospheres of planets - occurs when electrically charged particles accelerate along ...

'Cataclysmic' collision shaped Uranus' evolution

Jul 04, 2018 (SPX)

Astronomers at Durham University, UK, led an international team of experts to investigate how Uranus came to be tilted on its side and what consequences a giant...

Webb Telescope to target Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Jun 26, 2018 (SPX)

Jupiter's iconic storm is on the Webb telescope's list of targets chosen by guaranteed time observers, scientists who helped develop the incredibly complex tele...

Charon at 40: four decades of discovery on Pluto's largest moon

Jun 25, 2018 (SPX)

Before NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew through the Pluto system in July 2015, many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-batter...

A dark and stormy Jupiter

Jun 20, 2018 (SPX)

NASA's Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image at 10:31 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:31 a.m. EDT on May 24), as Juno performed its 13th close flyby of Jup...

Juno Solves 39-Year Old Mystery of Jupiter Lightning

Jun 11, 2018 (JPL)

In a new paper published in Nature, scientists from NASA's Juno mission describe the ways in which lightning on Jupiter is actually analogous to Earth's lightni...

New Horizons Wakes for Historic Kuiper Belt Flyby

Jun 07, 2018 (SPX)

Cruising through the Kuiper Belt more than 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth, New Horizons had been in resource-saving hibernation mode since ...

NASA Re-plans Juno's Jupiter Mission

Jun 07, 2018 (JPL)

An independent panel of experts confirmed in April that Juno is on track to achieve its science objectives and is already returning spectacular results.The Juno...

Collective gravity, not Planet Nine, may explain the orbits of 'detached objects'

Jun 05, 2018 (SPX)

CU Boulder Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers have offered up a new theory for the existence of planetary oddities like Sedna. This...

Scientists reveal the secrets behind Pluto's dunes

Jun 01, 2018 (SPX)

Writing in Science, an international team of geographers, physicists and planetary scientists have analysed detailed images of the dwarf planet's surface, captu...

'Surprising' methane dunes found on Pluto

May 31, 2018 (AFP)

Pluto's atmosphere has a surface pressure 100,000 times lower than Earth's, which researchers suspected might be too little to allow tiny grains of solid methan...

Pluto may be giant comet made up of comets, study says

May 29, 2018 (UPI)

Scientists at the Southwest Research Institute investigated two theories about the formation of what was previously known as the farthest-out planet in the sola...