OUTERPLANETS

845 articles

Hubble discovers moon orbiting the dwarf planet Makemake
Apr 29, 2016 (SPX)
Peering to the outskirts of our solar system, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a small, dark moon orbiting Makemake, the second brightest icy dwarf pla...
Pluto's 'Halo' Craters
Apr 22, 2016 (SPX)
Within Pluto's informally named Vega Terra region is a field of eye-catching craters that looks like a cluster of bright halos scattered across a dark landscape...
Pluto's haze varies in brightness
Apr 19, 2016 (SPX)
Scientists on NASA's New Horizons mission team are learning more about the structure and behavior of Pluto's complex atmosphere by discovering new attributes of...
Icy 'Spider' on Pluto
Apr 08, 2016 (SPX)
Sprawling across Pluto's icy landscape is an unusual geological feature that resembles a giant spider. "Oh, what a tangled web Pluto's geology weaves," said Oli...
Planet X takes shape
Apr 08, 2016 (SPX)
Astrophysicists at the University of Bern have modelled the evolution of the putative planet in the outer solar system. They estimate that the object has a pres...
Multitasking New Horizons observed solar wind changes on journey to Pluto
Apr 07, 2016 (SPX)
In addition to its history-making encounter with Pluto last July, the New Horizons spacecraft also recorded significant changes in how the solar wind behaves fa...
New Horizons fills gap in space environment observations
Apr 06, 2016 (SPX)
When NASA's New Horizons sped past Pluto on July 14, 2015, it took the best-ever pictures of the rocky world s surface, giving us new insight into its geology, ...
Pluto's bladed terrain in 3-D
Apr 04, 2016 (SPX)
One of the strangest landforms spotted by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft when it flew past Pluto last July was the "bladed" terrain just east of Tombaugh Regio,...
A frozen pond on Pluto
Mar 28, 2016 (SPX)
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft spied several features on Pluto that offer evidence of a time millions or billions of years ago when - thanks to much higher pres...
More surprises in store for the New Horizons spacecraft?
Mar 23, 2016 (SPX)
Students at CU-Boulder, who built a dust counter for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, have been eyeing the data for decade now. And the results are showing th...
Five papers provide new data from flyby of Pluto
Mar 21, 2016 (SPX)
Pluto's surface exhibits a wide variety of landscapes, results from five new studies in this special issue on the New Horizons mission report. The dwarf planet ...
Dust counter got few 'hits' on Pluto flyby
Mar 21, 2016 (SPX)
A student-built University of Colorado Boulder instrument riding on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft found only a handful of dust grains, the building blocks of p...
Waiting for Shadows from the Distant Solar System
Mar 17, 2016 (SPX)
How can we hope to measure the hundreds of thousands of objects in our distant solar system? A team of astronomers is harnessing citizen science to begin to tac...
Pluto's 'Snakeskin' Terrain: Cradle of the Solar System?
Mar 17, 2016 (SPX)
Today's blog post is from Orkan Umurhan, a mathematical physicist currently working as a senior post-doc at NASA Ames Research Center. He has been on the New Ho...
What's Eating at Pluto?
Mar 15, 2016 (SPX)
Far in the western hemisphere, scientists on NASA's New Horizons mission have discovered what looks like a giant "bite mark" on Pluto's surface. They suspect it...
Methane Snow on Pluto's Peaks
Mar 04, 2016 (SPX)
The New Horizons team has discovered a chain of exotic snowcapped mountains stretching across the dark expanse on Pluto informally named Cthulhu Regio. One of P...
Versatile Instrument to Scout for Kuiper Belt Objects
Mar 04, 2016 (JPL)
At the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, astronomers are busy tinkering with a high-tech instrument that could discover a variety of objects both far from Ear...
The Frozen Canyons of Pluto's North Pole
Feb 26, 2016 (SPX)
This ethereal scene captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft tells yet another story of Pluto's diversity of geological and compositional features-this time i...
Search narrows for Planet Nine
Feb 23, 2016 (AFP)
US astronomers announced last month they may have found a ninth planet beyond Neptune, but conceded they had no idea where on an estimated 10,000-20,000-year or...
Pluto's 'Hulk-like' Moon Charon: A Possible Ancient Ocean?
Feb 19, 2016 (SPX)
Pluto's largest moon may have gotten too big for its own skin. Images from NASA's New Horizons mission suggest that Pluto's moon Charon once had a subsurface oc...
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