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Saturn is a blatant indicator that the planet is rotating tilted. The belted giant rotates with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun at a 26.7-degree inclination. Since Saturn's tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at almost the same rate as Neptune's orbit, astronomers have long hypothesized that this tilt results from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune. Saturn may have once been in sync with Neptune, but according to a recent modeling research by scientists at MIT and other institutions, Saturn has since eluded Neptune's influence. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The one carefully examined theory the team has is a missing moon. The team claims in a paper published in Science that Saturn, which currently has 83 moons, originally had at least one additional satellite that they have named Chrysalis. The researchers hypothesize that Chrysalis, together with its siblings, orbited Saturn for several billion years while exerting...

According to astronomers, planets are born in protoplanetary disks, which are the rings of gas and dust that encircle newly formed, young stars. Even though the universe has hundreds of these disks, it has been challenging to observe genuine planetary birth and development in these settings. A new method for finding these elusive young planets has now been devised by astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and with it, "smoking gun" proof of a small Neptune- or Saturn-like planet lurking in a disk. The Astrophysical Journal Letters today published a description of the findings. According to Feng Long, a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Astrophysics and project leader, "directly finding young planets is highly tough and has thus far only been effective in one or two situations." Because they are encased in substantial amounts of gas and dust, planets are always too dim for us to see them. Instead, they must look for signs that a ...

An gadget the size of a lunchbox is demonstrating its ability to consistently carry out the work of a tiny tree on the red and dusty surface of Mars, some 100 million miles from Earth. Since it landed on Mars in February 2021 as part of NASA's Perseverance rover mission, the MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, has been successfully producing oxygen from the Red Planet's carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere. Researchers say that by the end of 2021, MOXIE was able to manufacture oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric circumstances, including day and night and throughout the Martian seasons, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances. The instrument produced six grams of oxygen per hour on each run, or about the same amount as a small tree on Earth. According to researchers, a scaled-up MOXIE may be transported to Mars before a human trip to create oxygen continually at the rate of several hundred trees. At t...

The conventional wisdom regarding the genesis of our planet has been turned on its head by new study from Curtin University that suggests the early continents of Earth were formed as a result of comet impacts as our Solar System entered and exited the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. A new perspective on Earth's early history and our place in the universe is provided by the new research, which was published in Geology and challenges the conventional wisdom that the planet's crust was only created by internal processes. Studying minerals in the Earth's crust revealed a rhythm of crust production every 200 million years or so, Professor Chris Kirkland, the study's principal investigator, from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said. This rhythm matched our Solar System's transit through regions of the galaxy with a higher density of stars. Every 200 million years or so, the Solar System passes between the spiral arms of the Milky Way as it revolv...

The Moon has continued to hold an enduring interest for humanity. But it wasn't until Galileo's time that researchers started to take it seriously. Researchers have proposed a variety of, hotly contested ideas as to how the Moon was generated throughout the course of roughly five centuries. At ETH Zurich, geochemists, cosmochemists, and petrologists have now cast new light on the formation of the Moon. The research team's findings, which have just been reported in the journal Science Advances, demonstrate that the Moon acquired the native noble gases helium and neon from the Earth's mantle. The finding strengthens the already tight limitations on the widely accepted "Giant Impact" theory, which postulates that Earth and another celestial body collided violently to create the Moon. Patrizia Will examined six samples of moon meteorites from an Antarctic collection that NASA provided for her dissertation work at ETH Zurich. The meteorites are made of basalt rock,...

In the Jezero Crater of Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover is now gathering soil and rock samples that will eventually be sent back to Earth. According to the present plan, the sample tubes will be delivered by the rover to a Mars lander in 2030 so that they may be sent back to Earth. As the NASA Mars Sample Return team stated in late July, two tiny helicopters would be ready to intervene if something goes wrong. The Sample Recovery Helicopters would be the second and third rotorcraft to ever take flight on another planet if that were to happen. Additionally, their presence in the NASA and ESA-led Mars Sample Return mission may herald the start of a new era in Mars exploration, one in which tiny, lightweight helicopters routinely fly around the planet. Just over a year has passed since NASA's Ingenuity helicopter first sailed to the skies of Mars in April 2021, making the announcement of the addition of helicopters to the Mars Sample Return mission exciting. The experimental rotor...

The first comprehensive map of hydrogen abundances on the surface of the Moon has been created by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, using data gathered more than 20 years ago. The map indicates two categories of lunar minerals with elevated hydrogen and supports earlier hypotheses concerning lunar hydrogen and water, including the conclusion that water was probably involved in the first magma-ocean creation and solidification of the Moon. The orbital neutron data from the Lunar Prospector mission were utilized by NASA Ames Research Center's Rick Elphic, David Lawrence, Patrick Peplowski, and Jack Wilson to create their map. Before it crashed into the lunar surface, the probe, which NASA launched in 1998, orbited the Moon for a year and a half and returned the first direct evidence of elevated hydrogen near the lunar poles. Cosmic rays, or high-energy protons and neutrons that travel across space at almost the speed of light, ar...

A recent research may shed light on why the inner solar system rotates far more slowly than what is predicted by the principles of contemporary physics. Around newborn stars, a thin circle of gas and dust called an accretion disk spirals. The remaining star-forming material in these disks, where planets develop, is only a small portion of the mass of the star. The inner half of the disk should spin faster as the material spirals gently inward toward the star in accordance with the rule of conservation of angular momentum, just like figure skaters spin faster when they draw their arms closer to their bodies. The inner solar system, which encompasses the terrestrial planets and spans from the sun to the asteroid belt, does not rotate as quickly as would be anticipated by the rule of conservation of angular momentum, according to earlier findings. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have shown how particles in the accretion disk interact using novel simulations ...