Testing the Limits of Gravity at Mercury
By studying the precise movements of NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft around Mercury we can constrain some of the fundamental parameters of general relativity.
Making Mountains out of…?
If there’s one thing that 21st-century telescopes have shown us about Pluto, it’s that there’s still a lot we don’t know about our very far-off neighbor. Today we look into just one of Pluto’s many mysteries: the formation of its complex five-moon system.
On the origins of our interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua
Apparently, rocky asteroids like our interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua are likely to be formed in binary stars.
Charging forward to Alpha Centauri!
In our latest installment of “how on Earth do we get to Proxima b?”, we consider the effects of magnetic fields on the trajectory of Breakthrough Starshot’s proposed sailcraft.
Proxima Centauri sports a fancy dust ring
Astronomers using ALMA have just discovered that our closest neighbor has at least one dust ring, analog to the Kuiper belt in the solar system. Sorry, but a reference to Lord of the Rings is unavoidable.
First detection of an equatorial jet on Venus
Slowly-rotating Venus has some seriously speedy clouds. Using near-infrared images from Japan’s first Venus orbiter, Horinouchi and collaborators study the atmospheric dynamics of our strange sister planet.