Will we find signs of tectonics on Pluto? And what would that mean?
New Horizons will arrive at Pluto in mid-2015. Images of ancient tectonic features on its surface may provide evidence for the existence of an ancient, subsurface ocean.
A New Moon from Saturn’s Ring
For the first time ever, signatures from a newly formed moon are spotted in Saturn’s ring system.
How Weird Is Our Solar System?
Earth and its Solar System compatriots all have nearly circular orbits, but many exoplanets orbit their stars on wildly eccentric paths. Is our home system strange? Or is our sense of the data skewed?
Crowd-Sourcing Crater Identification
How good are citizen-scientists at characterizing crater densities and size distributions on the lunar surface? For that matter how good are the experts? Today’s study attempts to answer these questions by having a group of experts analyze images of the Moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.
Life, the Universe and Everything Explained
Why resort to complicated theories that involve mysterious, unknown forces and states of matter? The geocentric model of the Universe nicely explains 1st century C.E. data.
Pluto’s Dusty Neighborhood
Pluto’s small satellites have very low escape velocities, which means that dust kicked up by impacts has a relatively easy time of escaping rather than settling back down to the little moon’s surface. Today’s paper looks at the fates of that dust.