A 1,000-mile-long (1,600 kilometers) Martian cloud that emerges and then quickly disappears from the Red Planet's sky nearly every day is even weirder than scientists realized. New simulations suggest that the eerie apparition can only be explained using "exotic physics" that have been theorized but never seen on Earth or anywhere else in the solar system.

The mysterious floating mass, dubbed the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC), frequently emerges above Arsia Mons, a 12-mile-tall (20 km) extinct volcano located in the Tharsis region, just south of the Red Planet's equator. The water vapor cloud was first spotted in 2018 by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and has since appeared nearly every morning throughout Mars' spring and summer, when increased solar radiation triggers strong surface winds. But it lasts only a few hours each day, before fully evaporating.

The AMEC can stretch up to 1,100 miles (1,800 km) long, around one-twelfth of Mars' circumference. For context, that is roughly twice the length of the U.K. or the distance between New York City and Miami.

Although the Red Planet is no stranger to giant dust clouds and occasional "iridescent streaks" of carbon dioxide, it is almost completely devoid of atmospheric water vapor. That makes it extremely rare for puffy, Earth-like clouds to form there, let alone ones so vast. As a result, scientists have struggled to explain this whacky weather.

But in a new study published Wednesday (Oct. 7) in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers used Mars Express data to create new simulations in an effort to finally explain the AMEC. Initially, the team struggled to recreate the puzzling phenomenon. But when they abandoned traditional meteorological principles in favor of a more out-of-the-box explanation, they were eventually successful.

"To create the AMEC in our modelling, we found that we needed to include some exotic physics … physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature," study first author Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who was affiliated with Sorbonne University in Paris at the time of the study, said in a statement. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped."

"Wholly unexpected"

The AMEC is an orographic cloud, meaning it forms as strong winds push water vapor up and over a raised structure, such as a mountain. Similar clouds also exist on Earth, including the "Levanter" cloud, which occasionally forms above the Rock of Gibraltar in southern Europe. However, the Martian equivalent cannot be explained by the same processes that occur on our planet.

On Earth, clouds form via a process called heterogeneous nucleation, in which moist air cools and condenses into ice crystals that form around tiny atmospheric particles, such as dust, salt, pollen or soot. But while Mars has plenty of atmospheric dust, that's not what's happening there.

"For the AMEC, it seems that cloud formation takes place without needing any of this 'stuff' [in the air]," said Hernández-Bernal, who has been studying the AMEC for the past six years. "Water vapour turns directly into icy cloud particles without any middle step. It's akin to droplets of condensation appearing in the middle of a room, rather than on a window."

The researchers call this "homogeneous nucleation" and say it has never been seen before in a planetary atmosphere. "It's wholly unexpected," Hernández-Bernal added.

Other scientists previously predicted that homogeneous nucleation could occur in Earth's upper atmosphere or in the skies above Venus. However, this has been deemed highly unlikely because it requires humidity levels roughly 100,000 times greater than those on our planet's surface.

Given that modern-day Mars is almost completely devoid of water, it may seem unlikely that its humidity levels could reach such lofty heights. However, the Mars Express data tells a different story.

As wind rises up the slopes of Arsia Mons, which is more than twice as tall as Mount Everest, it creates a powerful wave that shoots air into the upper atmosphere at tremendous speed. The researchers calculated that the temperature of this air can drop by up to 54 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in just 10 minutes. This not only makes it easy to freeze but also greatly increases the humidity within the wave, allowing homogeneous nucleation to take place, the simulations show.

So where does all this water come from? Some of it is already in the atmosphere, but some likely originates at the summit of Arsia Mons, which is covered with a thick layer of frost, the researchers suggested.

"A big success"

The new simulations mark a big step forward in our understanding of the AMEC and wider Martian meteorology.

"We don't have nearly as much information about Mars' atmosphere as we do about Earth's, so reproducing the AMEC to this degree is a big success for the model," Hernández-Bernal said.

The findings would not have been possible without the Mars Express orbiter, which used three instruments — the Visual Monitoring Camera, the High Resolution Stereo Camera and the OMEGA instrument — to map out how the AMEC takes shape and evolves every day. It is also one of the only Mars spacecraft that can see Arsia Mons in daylight.

"Mars Express discovered the AMEC, has followed up and monitored it for years, and is now helping reveal the secrets of its formation," Colin Wilson, the project scientist for Mars Express, who was not involved in the new study, said in the statement.

The discovery is also a reminder that, despite sharing the same basic principles, weather systems do not behave the same on other worlds as they do on Earth, which could have big implications for solar system exploration and the hunt for extraterrestrial life on distant exoplanets.

"While clouds on Earth and Mars seem to be governed by the same 'rules', understanding this exotic Martian cloud required exotic physics — and this may be true elsewhere in the cosmos," Wilson said.

Astronomers have spotted a never-before-seen type of "phoenix planet" rising from the ashes of a dying alien sun. The discovery, which the scientists say was "completely unexpected," raises hopes that more of these reborn alien worlds could be lurking throughout the cosmos — and may offer a glimpse of our own solar system's fate.

The unnamed exoplanet was spotted circling the white dwarf HS 0209+0832, which is located roughly 270 light-years from Earth. White dwarfs are stellar remnants, sometimes dubbed "zombie stars," that form from the leftovers of massive red giants that run out of fuel before eventually collapsing into shriveled husks. HS 0209+0832 is a particularly young white dwarf, still burning at around 63,000 degrees Fahrenheit (35,000 degrees Celsius), which suggests it made this transition within the past few million years.

Scientists previously discovered some surprising heavy elements within the visible spectrum of HS 0209+0832, which was first captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in the late 1990s. These elements ‪—‬ which included aluminium, titanium and nickel ‪—‬ are not normally found inside white dwarfs, so their presence suggested that something unusual was going on. But until now, there was not enough data to figure out what.

In the new study, published Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers took a closer look at HS 0209+0832. Using some of Hubble's updated instruments and data from other observatories, the team captured a more detailed spectrum of the stellar zombie. This revealed a high concentration of additional heavy elements, including zinc and copper, as well as niobium, which has never been seen in a white dwarf before.

The researchers think these out-of-place elements were created during the death throes of the former red giant and later coalesced into a "second-generation" planet around the newly forged white dwarf. They suspect the atmosphere of this hypothetical planet is being stripped by the white dwarf's stellar winds, causing the rare elements to fall back onto the zombie star.

Follow-up observations then revealed a recurring dip in the brightness of HS 0209+0832, suggesting that an exoplanet was repeatedly passing in front of the undead star. Based on the alien world's orbit, which lasts approximately 4.4 Earth days, and the duration of its transits in front of the star, the team predicted that the planet is roughly the size of Jupiter. (Its close proximity to the white dwarf also supports the hypothesis that its atmosphere is being stripped away.)

"Second-generation planets are worlds that form out of the material a star casts off as it dies," study first author Jamie Williams, a doctoral candidate in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Warwick in the U.K., said in a statement. "They're incredibly rare, and finding one around a white dwarf was completely unexpected. It's a bit like finding a planet that has risen from the ashes of the very star it once orbited."

"Completely unexpected"

This is not the first time astronomers have spotted an exoplanet around a white dwarf. For example, in 2019, some of the authors of the new study previously spotted an alien world surrounding the white dwarf WDJ0914+1914. However, in that case, they were confident that it was a first-generation world that somehow survived its star's fiery end.

But the heavy elements that seem to be falling onto HS 0209+0832 — and the relative lack of other elements common in first-generation planets, such as silicon and iron — suggest that's not what's happened for this recently detected world.

"This pattern of elements is a telltale sign of the 's-process,' a nuclear reaction that builds heavy elements inside dying stars during their bloated red giant phase," study co-author Nicholas Stone, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in the statement. "It's a chemical signature no ordinary, 'first-generation' planet should carry, which told us that this new planet was something different."

Instead, the newly detected exoplanet likely formed directly from the material that was shed by the dying red giant after it expanded and before it collapsed in on itself.

Similar phoenix planets have been spotted alongside other stellar remnants, such as pulsars, which form when stars explode as supernovas. However, until now, such worlds have never been seen around a white dwarf.

Rising from the ashes

"What's remarkable about the planet around HS 0209+0832 is that this isn't a planet from somewhere else, or a survivor from the system's birth, it looks like it was built from the very material its own star cast off as it died," study co-author Boris Gänsicke, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick who also helped to discover the exoplanet around WDJ0914+1914 in 2019, said in the statement. "In a sense, this system has given birth to a new world using the foundations of the old one."

HS 0209+0832 may have once harbored other exoplanets when it was a red giant. But if they existed, these alien worlds likely perished in flames as the dying star ballooned — similar to what experts think will happen to Earth when the sun runs out of fuel and transitions into a red giant in around 5 billion years.

Once the sun has finished bulging, it will turn into a white dwarf too. The new discovery hints that our star could also host brand-new worlds after it has transformed, creating a sort of solar system 2.0.

"Finding this one example raises the question of how many more might be out there and might our own solar system host a second-generation planet formed from the ashes of our sun," Gänsicke said.

However, more work is required to figure out exactly how the newfound exoplanet formed and, as a result, how likely this scenario is. The researchers suspect that another object, such as a lost stellar sibling, may have been required to create the new world.

"Forming the protoplanetary disc in this situation is not easy and helps explain why these planets are so rare," Williams said. "To form a disc of material necessary to birth a planet, HS 0209+0832 likely required a companion star that pulled the ejected material back into orbit, rather than letting it escape."

You may have watched the moon block out the sun during a solar eclipse, but have you ever seen it do that to a planet? Early Tuesday (Oct. 6) morning, skywatchers across much of eastern North America will have an opportunity to watch a crescent moon pass directly in front of Jupiter. The rare alignment won't happen again for 11 years.

During the event, known as a lunar occultation, Jupiter will disappear behind the moon for up to about an hour before suddenly reappearing. The occultation will be visible before dawn from much of the eastern and central U.S., Canada and the Caribbean, while parts of Africa will experience the event during daylight, according to In-The-Sky.org.

The moon will be a beautiful waning crescent, just 20% illuminated, and Jupiter will shine brightly alongside it. The pair will rise together in the east early Tuesday morning and gradually appear to move closer as the moon travels eastward against the background stars.

When the occultation begins, Jupiter will remain hidden behind the moon for roughly an hour. No telescope will be needed to watch Jupiter disappear and reappear. However, a pair of binoculars or a small telescope will make the event much more dramatic.

Through a telescope, Jupiter will look like a tiny disc rather than a point of light and will take about a minute to disappear completely behind the moon. An easy way to photograph the event is to use a smart telescope to image the moon. (Here's everything you need to know about lunar photography).

Below are the times when Jupiter will disappear and reappear in 10 major cities Tuesday morning, according to the International Occultation Timing Association.

• Chicago: 3:22-4:17 a.m. CDT
• Atlanta: 4:15-5:17 a.m. EDT
• Detroit: 4:16-5:20 a.m. EDT
• Miami: 4:20-5:09 a.m. EDT
• Washington, D.C.: 4:20-5:24 a.m. EDT
• Philadelphia: 4:22-5:26 a.m. EDT
• New York: 4:23-5:27 a.m. EDT
• Toronto: 4:25-5:22 a.m. EDT
• Boston: 4:26-5:30 a.m. EDT
• Montreal: 4:30-5:26 a.m. EDT

Outside the occultation path, Jupiter won't disappear at all. Instead, it will appear to be skimmed by the crescent moon — still a potentially spectacular sight that could produce some amazing photos. From across much of the world, the crescent moon and Jupiter will appear exceptionally close together.

The next lunar occultation of Jupiter visible from North America will occur on Nov. 27, 2037, according to When The Curves Line Up.

Researchers have discovered an exoplanet that travels around its small, red star backward, much like a rubber duck spinning against the current in a whirlpool. The discovery could give insight about how exoplanets form around the most common types of stars in our galaxy.

It's a mystery why the alien world, called GJ 3090 b, orbits its star backward (also called a retrograde orbit). Stars and planets usually form from the same rotating disk of gas and dust, called a protoplanetary disk. Newly formed celestial objects normally rotate in the same direction as the protoplanetary disk, because changing the rotational direction requires a lot of energy applied in the right way.

Astronomers have discovered a few exoplanets with retrograde orbits before; these orbits often happen when the gravitational attraction of other massive objects in their star systems scrambles the planets' orbits. However, this newly discovered planetary system doesn't seem to have any massive objects that could have changed the retrograde planet's orbit, researchers reported in a study published Sept. 21 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"We looked for the kind of massive companion that could have forced the planet into such an extreme orbit," study co-author Yann Carteret, an astronomer at the University of Geneva, said in a statement. "We may need to think differently about how this system acquired its unusual architecture."

A planetary mystery

For their new study, the researchers analyzed 23 hours of observations from two exoplanet-hunting instruments installed on a 12-foot-wide (3.6 meters) telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. They saw the retrograde planet cross in front of its star 10 times. Each time it passed in front of the star, the starlight reaching Earth dimmed a little. Measuring the extent and duration of that dimming revealed the planet's size and information about its orbit.

What made this detection particularly difficult was the type of star: an M dwarf. These stars are small, relatively cool and so dim that even the closest M dwarf stars to Earth can't be seen with the naked eye. About three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way are M dwarfs, so studying them is particularly important for understanding our galaxy's exoplanets.

The star system in question is made of two, or possibly three, planets smaller than Neptune, each of which takes less than 16 days to orbit the star. GJ 3090 b is the innermost planet, completing an orbit about once every 2.9 days. Its orbit is one of the most misaligned ones scientists have detected so far, at a whopping 136 degrees out of alignment with the star's spin, making the planet nearly upside down ‪—‬ similar to Venus in our solar system.

Because GJ 3090 b is the planet closest to the star, it's unlikely that its orbit was disturbed by a massive planet or a hidden binary star; the other planets in the system are not upside down. And because they're farther from the star, a large gravitational disruption would probably affect them more, not less.

Instead, the researchers suggested that the unusual planet may have simply been born upside down. If a lot of gas and dust from outside the star system got sucked into the system, it might have replaced the protoplanetary disk with a second, newer disk at a different angle to the original, which could have formed the retrograde planet. The amount of material making up the inner planets (formed from the dusty, gaseous disk) is less than the amount that would pull on the star's spin enough to make the star change its rotational direction, keeping the system in a balanced misalignment, the researchers explained.

"The idea that a planetary system could be rebuilt from a second, differently oriented disk is particularly exciting," Vincent Bourrier, an astronomer at the University of Geneva and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "It suggests that the environment around a young star can play a much bigger role in determining the architecture of its planets than we might have expected."

Saturn is about to reach its annual opposition this week, when it appears at its brightest and biggest all year and becomes the only planet visible all night.

The short, exciting period for skywatchers has more to do with where Earth is in its orbit than with Saturn's journey around the sun. Opposition occurs when Earth moves directly between a planet and the sun, placing the two planets on the same side of the solar system. For observers on Earth, that means Saturn appears opposite the sun in the sky, just like a full moon (hence the name "opposition"). Saturn therefore rises in the east around sunset, 100% illuminated, before reaching its highest point around midnight and finally sinking toward the western horizon around sunrise.

This year's opposition occurs Sunday (Oct. 4), making the few weeks on each side an excellent time to start looking. At 784 million miles (1.26 billion kilometers) away, Saturn will be relatively close to Earth, causing its disk to appear about as large as it gets through a telescope and making its pale-yellow light shine more brightly than at other times of the year. You won't need any equipment to find it; under a clear sky, Saturn will be easily visible to the naked eye as a bright, steady point of light, between the constellations Pisces and Cetus.

Once you've located Saturn, the best way to view it is in a backyard telescope so you can see the planet's rings in sharp relief. Try it yourself — observing Saturn's rings for the first time is one of the most memorable sights available to amateur astronomers. Larger apertures and higher magnifications may also reveal some of Saturn's moons, including Titan, the planet's largest satellite, but even a relatively modest backyard telescope can reveal Saturn's rings.

The rings themselves are particularly interesting this year. Saturn's axial tilt means our viewing angle of the planet's rings changes throughout its roughly 29-year journey around the sun. After the rings appeared almost edge-on from Earth in 2025, they're gradually opening up again, giving observers an increasingly clear view.

You don't need to restrict your observing to the night of opposition; Saturn will remain a prominent evening target throughout October. However, the nights of Sept. 30 to Oct. 4 offer an ideal combination of brightness, visibility and all-night observing. There are also plenty of other great stargazing sights to look for this fall.

If you've been waiting for an excuse to point a telescope at Saturn, this is your moment. The next time Saturn will be at opposition will be Oct. 18, 2027.

For the first time, astronomers have detected radio signals coming directly from a planet outside our solar system, according to a new preprint study. Spoiler alert: It's not aliens. But astrophysicists are still very excited about this discovery.

"Astronomers have been looking for radio signals from exoplanets for some time," Suzanne Aigrain, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "There have been tentative, indirect detections before, but this is the first truly convincing direct detection, and it hopefully paves the way for many more."

Artificial radio signals are a key focus in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which involves scanning the cosmos for signs of alien life. Such "technosignatures" could suggest advanced technologies built by intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. However, radio signals can be emitted by natural sources, too.

"There are two natural processes that can produce radio emission in exoplanets," Aigrain said. "One is magnetic reconnection, when the planet orbits really close to the star and its magnetic field interacts directly with that of the star. The other is aurorae (like those we have on Earth and on other solar system planets like Saturn, but much stronger), when energetic charged particles streaming from the star interact with the upper atmosphere of the planet."

"This second effect is what the authors of the paper believe they have detected," Aigrain added.

In the study, a research group led by Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a graduate student at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, turned MeerKAT, a radio telescope array in South Africa, toward a massive gas giant called Beta Pictoris b, an exoplanet that's 64 light-years from Earth and has a mass roughly 10 times that of Jupiter, according to NASA. They picked up rapid, repeating bursts of radio signals coming from the planet.

At first, it wasn't clear whether the signal was coming from the planet or the star it orbits (named simply Beta Pictoris). However, after comparing the radio images of both the planet and the star with the positions of distant background quasars (bright, active galaxies that act as fixed reference points), the team confirmed that the radio bursts were indeed emanating from the gas giant.

"No radio detection has previously been unambiguously localized to an extrasolar planet rather than its host star," they wrote in the study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet.

Aigrain emphasized that "this is definitely not aliens!" The signals are consistent with what would be expected from auroras, and this finding offers insight into the planet itself. From these measurements, the team calculated the planet's magnetic-field strength, which they estimated to be roughly 1,250 gauss. For comparison, Jupiter's magnetic-field strength is only about 4.3 gauss and Earth's is a measly 0.5 gauss, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Magnetic-field measurements like these are important because we don't fully understand how planets' magnetospheres are generated and what controls how strong they are, Aigrain said. The ability to measure a planet's magnetic field could also help in our search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

"[A] planet's magnetic field shields its atmosphere from the 'wind' of charged particles from [its] star, which might otherwise carry material away from the atmosphere," Aigrain said. "On Earth, for example, the magnetic field has played a key role in retaining the atmosphere and shielding life on the planet from harmful high-energy radiation.

"The planet in this paper is quite massive and has a thick atmosphere, so even without a strong magnetic field it could probably hold on to its atmosphere, and it is not expected to host life," Aigrain added. "But in the future we might be able to make similar measurements for smaller planets, for which this shielding effect would be more important."

MeerKAT is a pathfinder instrument for a new large telescope called the Square Kilometre Array, which is expected to come online in the next few years. This observatory "will be significantly more powerful," Aigrain said, "so there will be many more systems where we can look for this type of signal."

As of Aug. 30, 2026, NASA's Curiosity rover has officially seen the sun rise and set over Mars' reddish horizon more than 5,000 times in its quest to discover if life ever existed there. The rover was originally planned to operate for only two years, but the mission is still going strong more than 14 years after landing on Mars in August 2012.

During that time, the rover has weathered global dust storms and climbed more than 3,200 feet (1,000 meters) up a mountain — although its tires have gotten some rather large holes in them in the process. The rover still uses its 17 cameras to take hundreds of photos every single sol (Martian day), beaming a total of more than 780,000 photos back to Earth for scientists to analyze while mission controllers decide where the rover should roam next.

In honor of the intrepid rover's 5,000th day on the Red Planet, here are 10 of the most iconic photos Curiosity has snapped for Earthlings to admire.

Sol 548: Mount Sharp on the horizon

Curiosity snapped this photo of Mount Sharp on Feb. 19, 2014, about a year and a half after it landed on Mars. At the time, scientists were hopeful the rover could make it to the base of the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers high) mountain to explore interesting terrain previously seen from space. As the years passed, Curiosity more than surpassed that goal; the rover has climbed more than half a mile up into the mountain's foothills, traveling a total of more than 23.6 miles (38 km) from its landing spot, all while conducting important science along the way.

Sol 956: Blue skies on Mars

Curiosity took a photo of the Martian sunset in color for the first time on April 15, 2015, revealing a brilliant blue sky just before the sun dipped behind the shrouded mountains in the distance. The Martian sky is usually yellow to orange, according to NASA. Fine dust particles in the atmosphere scatter red and yellow light across the entire sky. However, the dust is just the right size for some blue light to slip past, so most of the light in the sky near the sun is blue. The effect is much more pronounced when the sun is low in the horizon.

Sol 1128: Curiosity Selfie at Namib Dune

Curiosity has taken numerous selfies over the course of its mission, although the process is a bit more involved than holding up a camera and smiling. This selfie was made from 57 separate images taken on Jan. 19, 2016 using a camera attached to its robotic arm. Here, Curiosity is standing next to Namib Dune, one of the many dark sand dunes that make up the Bagnold Dune Field near Mount Sharp. Curiosity sampled the sand for analysis and scuffed the dune with its wheels so scientists could see how the sand moved.

Sol 1819: Curiosity leaves a thumbprint in the dust

Mars is extremely dusty. The reddish dust gets swept into the atmosphere and cast across most of the planet's surface, making it difficult for scientists to figure out what materials are on the surface just by looking at them. On Sept. 17, 2017, Curiosity dusted off the surface of a rock at Vera Rubin Ridge and took a picture for geologists to compare to rocks on Earth. Based on the reddish purple color, geologists think this rock is fine-grained hematite split by fractures filled with calcium sulfate minerals. It hints that Mars might be a lot more colorful underneath its dusty blanket. Scientists have since discovered ruby-like materials embedded in Martian rocks.

Sol 3466: Totally not a door for aliens

On May 7, 2022, Curiosity sent a curious photo back to Earth that appears to show a small door carved into the face of a cliff. It's hard not to imagine little green people entering it after taking their little green dogs for a stroll across the dusty landscape, but it's not actually a doorway for Martians. The 3-foot-tall opening's boxy shape is caused by vertical fractures intersecting with horizontal layers in the rock, according to NASA. The cliff is highly fractured, and a large chunk of rock that likely fell from the "doorway" is clearly visible nearby.

Sol 3724: Iridescent feather in the sky

Just after the sun went down on Jan. 27, 2023, Curiosity took this photo of a noctilucent (night-shining) cloud that formed much higher in the Martian atmosphere than most other clouds do. Any clouds on Mars are rare, but this one is extra special. Since this cloud is so high up, it's much colder — making scientists think it's made of carbon dioxide (dry ice) instead of water ice. The iridescent colors in the cloud indicate the ice particles making up the cloud are all around the same size, which means the cloud likely just formed at the time of the photo.

Sol 3725: Curiosity finds "Cacao"

The very next day after cloud-gazing, on Jan. 28, 2023, Curiosity found an iron-nickel meteorite measuring about a foot across. The meteorite, nicknamed "Cacao," is one of a handful of meteorites Curiosity has photographed. The rover zapped part of the meteorite with a laser and measured the vapor released to identify what materials the rock was made of. Since Mars is cold and dry compared to Earth, meteorites last much longer on its surface than they do here, and they give clues about how the Martian atmosphere has changed over time. Large iron meteorites discovered on Mars indicate the planet once had a denser atmosphere than it does today.

Sol 4208: Elemental sulfur crystal surprise

In June 2024, Curiosity unintentionally ran over a rock and crushed it, revealing a yellow, odorless surprise: rare crystals of elemental sulfur. While Mars has plenty of minerals that contain sulfur, like sulfate, this was the first time pure sulfur was found. The crystal fragments are about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) across. On Earth, pure sulfur is formed from volcanic and hydrothermal activity, along with other geologic processes. It's not clear yet how these crystals formed on Mars.

Sol 182 - 4263: All 42 drill samples

Curiosity has collected and analyzed 42 rock samples so far using a small drill attached to a robotic arm. The drill powders the rock so that the samples can be transported to Curiosity's science instruments, which measure their chemical composition. Each sample site is carefully chosen because the rover can only do a limited number of samples before it runs out of special sample cups. This mosaic image shows the impressive variety of materials that Curiosity has sunk its drill into.

Sol 4671: Exploring Martian spiderwebs

Researchers have been intrigued by large geologic structures like stone "spiderwebs" on the Martian surface, previously seen by spacecraft orbiting the planet. Curiosity visited them on the ground, taking this picture of the low ridges and hollows, called boxwork, on Sept. 26, 2025. The ridges, made from hardened minerals deposited by water seeping into cracked rock, are what's left after billions of years of erosion wore away the softer rock around them.

Curiosity's journey continues today. After leaving the boxwork structures last March, the rover set off to explore more of the Martian landscape with its cameras as busy as ever, looking for more evidence that Mars once had the water and chemistry to possibly support ancient microbial life.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

A picture of a distant, shark-shaped cloud of gas in space has earned the top prize in a Royal Observatory Greenwich contest for amateur space photographers.

Dubbed "The Quiet Predator," the image by skywatcher Ali Alobaidly shows off the Shark Nebula (LDN 1235), which is roughly 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. (For perspective, the nearest star system to our planet is only about 4 light-years away.) The stunning image was chosen as the overall winner of the Royal Observatory Greenwich's 18th ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest, whose honorees were announced Thursday (Sept. 17).

Alobaidly took the prize-winning image from the Jahra governorate in Kuwait over two days in August 2025, using an Askar 140 APO telescope, a Sky-Watcher EQ8-R mount and a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera.

"The juxtaposition of an oceanic predator, prowling the skies above the Kuwaiti desert, is something I find deeply poetic, and it is what first drew me to this remarkable region of the sky," Alobaidly said in a statement. "To me, it represents perfectly my love for both the universe, and the deserts of my ancestors."

Alobaidly's work, as well as 10 ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year category winners, will be on display at the National Maritime Museum in London starting Friday (Sept. 18). Alobaidly received a prize of 10,000 British pounds (about $13,300), while category winners and runners-up received various smaller cash prizes.

Below are several of the individual category winners, along with their breathtaking photos.

Aurorae: "The Crown," by Radoslav Sviretsov (Bulgaria). This image was captured during a strong northern lights display at a small church between Keflavík and Reykjavík, Iceland. The statement noted that the location is "far from light pollution ‪—‬ a place where the sky remains dark and truly alive."

Our Moon: "Venusian Pearl on the Moon," by Petr Horalek (Czechia). This image was taken on Sept. 19, 2025, when the moon passed in front of Venus from the perspective of select locations on Earth. "The most beautiful moment was when Venus had just started to disappear behind the crescent. It looked like a bright pearl on the lunar limb," the observatory judges stated. (Horalek is no newcomer to astrophotography, and Live Science has featured several of his incredible images before.)

Our Sun: "Active Region 4122," by Miguel Claro (Portugal). Claro, a frequent contributor to Space.com, a sister site of Live Science, used a new dual-band telescope to capture the sun's photosphere, or visible surface layer. Claro's work shows convection cells, which are superheated gas or plasma regions on the sun, as well as bright spots between these regions.

People and Space: "A Message from the Ancients," by Max Inwood (Aotearoa/New Zealand). Inwood showcased petroglyphs (ancient rock art) in California's desert in his prize-winning photo. The petroglyph in the image is believed to show the 13 full moons Earth usually witnesses each year.

Planets, Comets & Asteroids: "Saturnian Equinox," by Tom Williams (U.K.). Saturn's rings appear edge-on from the perspective of Earth in this 2025 image showing a rare event during the planet's near-30-year circuit of the sun. Williams' photo displays "the start of local spring in the planet's southern hemisphere," observatory representatives stated.

Skyscapes: "Botswana Star Trail," by Stefano Pellegrini (Italy). This image was captured in Botswana in a location called Nxai Pan, which has large baobab trees. "Pellegrini played with the exposure and saturation, resulting in this almost psychedelic image," observatory representatives said.

Galaxies: "NGC 4753: A Symphony of Dust Lanes in Virgo," by © 智鹏 严and Xinran Li (China). This image, taken in Chile, showcases NGC 4753, a galaxy roughly 60 million light-years from our planet, in the constellation Virgo. The photo highlights a "striking network of dust lanes swirling around its luminous core," observatory representatives explained.

To see the full list of winners and the judges' statements, visit the contest website.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Sept. 18 at 9:30 a.m. ET. An earlier version mistakenly called the constellation Cepheus 'the whale'. In fact, Cetus is 'the whale' constellation.

A "baby" exoplanet, discovered emerging from its cosmic cocoon around a nearby star, is the youngest alien world ever seen, a new study reveals. The planetary infant is less than 1 million years old and could help researchers study how other planets, including our own, took shape.

The juvenile world, dubbed Elias 2-24 b, orbits a newly formed star around 450 light-years from Earth. It is somewhere between two and four times as massive as Jupiter and almost twice as far from its home star as Neptune is from the sun.

Astronomers spotted initial signs of the hefty exoplanet in 2017, when they noticed a small gap in the star's protoplanetary disk — the swirling ring of gas, dust and other stellar debris left over from the star's creation. This gap strongly implied that an exoplanet had formed there after enough of the disk's spinning material had gravitationally clumped together, the process by which most planets form. However, the alien world was not directly visible at the time.

In the new study, published Sept. 16 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers combined observations from three telescopes — the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also in Chile — to take a closer look at the gap in the protoplanetary disk. Not only was the team able to directly image Elias 2-24 b and confirm its existence, but the researchers also dated it, revealing that the alien world is likely less than 1 million years old.

"What makes Elias 2-24 b so remarkable is its age," study first author Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral student with the Institute of Astrophysical Studies (IEA) at Diego Portales University in Chile, said in a statement. "This is the youngest planet detected so far, and because it is still actively accreting material from its surroundings, we're able to observe a stage of planet formation that is rarely seen directly."

The newly confirmed exoplanet is roughly 5,000 times younger than Earth or around 0.008% the age of the oldest known exoplanet, PSR B1620-26 b or "Methuselah," which formed around 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. Compared to the average human lifespan, this makes Elias 2-2 b roughly equivalent to a two- or three-day-old baby.

Record setter

This is not the first time that astronomers have spotted baby exoplanets. But until recently, there has been an age limit on when they become visible to us.

For a long time, the youngest-known exoplanets, which included several worlds orbiting the star PDS 70, were around 5 million years old. This is because telescopes were not powerful enough to spot exoplanets until they had cleared a large enough gap in their star's protoplanetary disks. But advances in telescope design and data analysis have helped researchers push past this age limit: For example, in 2024, astronomers discovered TIDYE-1b, which is believed to be around 3 million years old; and in 2025, scientists detected AB Aurigae b, which could be as young as 2 million years old.

Elias 2-24 b is at least twice as young as any known exoplanet, which is a significant step forward. This provides scientists with a rare opportunity to fill in the current knowledge gaps surrounding the initial stages of planet formation.

"Our planet-formation models already struggled to explain the previous record holders for the youngest known planet," Lucas Cieza, an IEA astronomer who led the 2017 study that first spotted the gap left by Elias 2-24 b, said in a second NASA statement. "Elias 2-24 b shows us that even our best planet-formation models are still missing some important processes."

Mind the gaps

A majority of the more than 6,000 exoplanets discovered so far have been spotted via the transit method, where a distant world passes between its home star and Earth, causing a temporary dip in the star's brightness. However, this doesn't work if the alien worlds lurk within a protoplanetary disk, because the swirling debris cloud permanently dims the star's light when viewed side-on. This has created a bias toward finding older exoplanets.

The only way to spot a juvenile exoplanet is if a star's protoplanetary disk is perpendicular to Earth, so that we are looking at it from the top down or bottom up and can clearly see any gaps within it. But this is much harder because the light from the star often outshines the disks, meaning we are "mostly blind to these baby planets right now," Cieza said.

However, this could change thanks to NASA's soon-to-be-operational Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which launched into space Aug. 30 and is currently calibrating its instruments before beginning its potentially decades-long mission to observe the cosmos. The space telescope is equipped with a state-of-the-art starshade, or coronagraph, which blocks out the light from distant stars, making it easier to study their surroundings. Experts predict that Roman could spot up to 100,000 new exoplanets during its mission and will have less of a bias toward older planets, meaning we should find many more planetary infants.

"This is just the beginning of a new era of discovery," Cieza said. "Roman will take planet hunting to the next level."

Scientists melted diamonds with a powerful laser to take some of the most precise measurements of the mineral's elusive melting point — and found that previous experiments were off by more than 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius).

It's odd to think of diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth, melting — but melt it does when blasted with extremely powerful lasers under the right conditions. Understanding how diamond responds to shock waves from lasers is an important part of developing nuclear fusion, the process that powers stars. Nuclear fusion is also a potential energy source for the future, so researchers have put a lot of effort into developing models that describe and predict how diamond behaves.

However, diamond is weird. Although the experimental data and theoretical models match up pretty well most of the time, there have been some strange discrepancies scientists haven't been able to explain. The biggest one is the 2,240 F (1,244 C) ‪—‬ roughly 20% ‪—‬ difference between previous experimental data and model-predicted melting temperatures of diamond. There's also been some debate about whether diamond reorganizes its atoms into a different kind of solid carbon before turning into a liquid at the end of the melting process.

Researchers have struggled to explain these discrepancies because the conditions diamond melts at are so extreme that it's extraordinarily difficult to measure it in labs on Earth. However, new experiments may finally offer the solution that scientists have pursued for two decades.

In a study published Aug. 13 in the journal Nature Physics, scientists zapped tiny plates of synthetic diamond with an ultraviolet laser, creating shock waves that were so powerful that as they passed through the samples, the diamond changed from transparent to mirror-like. The strong increase in reflectivity is one indication the diamond melted. By combining this change with measurements of how brightly the diamonds glowed while being zapped, the researchers mapped the melting temperature with great precision.

"We were able to take tiny diamond samples and shock compress them to temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and to pressures higher than the center of Neptune and Uranus — and still measure atomic structure, temperature, density and optical reflectivity," study co-author Marius Millot, a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

The team found that the diamond sample's melting temperature was more than 1,300 F lower than previously thought — putting the melting point in line with theoretical predictions and finally explaining the long-held discrepancy.

The team also measured the samples' atomic structure with X-ray diffraction and saw that the diamond didn't transition to a different kind of solid carbon before melting, possibly because the energy required to rearrange the atoms was too large, the researchers wrote.

However, they also hypothesized that multiple shocks could be powerful enough for this transition to occur and that the way the shocks are applied to the diamond might affect how it changes phase. Understanding this is important for nuclear fusion research, as certain types of experiments involve lasers melting and crushing a diamond capsule to put the capsule’s contents, solid deuterium and tritium, under more than 30 petapascals of pressure and temperatures higher than 180 million F (100 million C), the requisite conditions for a fusion chain reaction to occur.

The researchers found that between about 660 and 1,060 gigapascals of pressure and at around 12,140 F (6,727 C), diamond exists as solid chunks floating in liquid carbon. As the pressure increases, more diamond transitions into liquid carbon, which is thought to be a very strange material. Unlike most forms carbon takes on Earth ‪—‬ like coal, graphite and diamond ‪—‬ liquid carbon is metallic, so it conducts electricity. It's also denser than diamond. So hypothetically, if you somehow were to put liquid carbon in a cup without instantly vaporizing it, a chunk of solid diamond could happily bob around in it like an ice cube in a glass of water.

Knowing how diamond behaves under such extreme conditions is also important for understanding the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune. Based on measurements from the Voyager 2 spacecraft in the late 1980s and lab experiments on Earth, scientists think it literally rains huge chunks of diamond inside these planets and that their mantles may have liquid carbon oceans with diamonds floating around like icebergs. The new research means scientists can make better predictions about the planets’ interiors and their carbon cycles.

See how much you know about gemstones with our gold and gems quiz!

Given that it's the closest planet to the sun, Mercury seems like it should be the hottest planet in our solar system.

However, at a blistering 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius), Venus tops Mercury's 800 F (430 C) highest surface temperature, despite being an average of 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) farther from the sun. So how can the second planet from our star be hotter than the closest planet to it?

It all comes down to reflectivity, atmospheric composition and geological history, experts told Live Science.

Totally different atmospheres

A planet's distance from its star is not the only factor that influences the planet's temperature.

"Distance tells us how much sunlight arrives at a planet, but it does not tell us how much is reflected … absorbed, how efficiently heat escapes, or how effectively the atmosphere transports heat around the planet," Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist who studies planetary habitability at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science in an email. "Those properties can be just as important as distance, and sometimes much more important."

Mercury makes the case in miniature. According to Kane, the planet has essentially no atmosphere, so incoming sunlight strikes bare rock directly, heating it to extreme temperatures during the day. But with barely anything overhead to trap that warmth, Mercury radiates it straight back into space the moment the sun sets. As a result, nighttime temperatures plunge from roughly 800 F (430 C) during the day to about minus 290 F (minus 180 C) at night ‪—‬ a swing of well over 1,000 degrees, he added.

Venus tells the opposite story. Wrapped in an atmosphere that's roughly 90 times as dense as Earth's and consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide, Venus traps heat so effectively that its surface temperature barely changes at all, no matter where the sun happens to be, Kane explained.

A permanent blanket

Sunlight arrives at a planet mostly as near-infrared radiation and visible light, which pass through atmospheres consisting primarily of gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide with relatively little trouble. Once the ground and lower atmosphere absorb that energy, though, they re-release it as infrared radiation, the kind of energy we feel as heat. Carbon dioxide happens to be excellent at grabbing and holding on to infrared radiation, Kane noted.

On Venus, the atmosphere is so deep and loaded with carbon dioxide that infrared energy leaving the surface gets absorbed and re-emitted over and over before any of it finally escapes into space. Some of that energy gets redirected back downward, Kane said, further warming the planet's lower atmosphere and surface. However, the heat isn't trapped forever, since energy conservation means that Venus must eventually release the same amount of energy it absorbs.

Notably, Venus doesn't actually soak up more sunlight than Mercury overall. Thick cloud cover reflects roughly three-quarters of incoming sunlight back into space before it ever reaches the ground, and only about 3% of the sunlight that arrives at Venus makes it down to the surface, Kane said. In fact, if that atmosphere and cloud deck were stripped away, a bare-rock Venus would actually run cooler than Mercury, since it would be receiving only about 29% as much sunlight from the start, he explained. It's the blanket, not the sunbathing, that makes Venus the hotter world.

Where the blanket came from

Venus' atmospheric blanket didn't spring into existence all at once, and how it formed is its own open question. Venus shows strong evidence of past and present volcanic and tectonic activity acting to smother the planet in greenhouse gases, Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist and associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, told Live Science in an email.

This volcanic activity has been so intense that Bryne describes modern Venus as sitting in a "post-runaway greenhouse" state, where its extreme heat has become a self-sustaining process regardless of what the planet's interior is doing at any given moment.

The heat isn't being generated from below; it's a consequence of the atmosphere Venus already has, locked in place by the same infrared-trapping effect described above.

Taken together, the experts' answers point to the same underlying lesson: How close a planet sits to its star is only the opening chapter of its climate story. What kind of atmosphere it has and how effectively that atmosphere holds on to heat are usually responsible for the rest.

See how well you know our planetary neighborhood with our solar system quiz!

Mercury, which is about one-third the size of Earth, may have shrunk more in its evolution than scientists originally thought.

A new study suggests that the tiny planet may have contracted 10% to 30% more than previous models suggested — meaning the planet’s total diameter shrunk almost 12 miles (19 km) since Mercury was formed. (Mercury’s diameter today is roughly 3,032 miles (4,880 km).

Previous missions overlooked the extent of the shrinkage because impact-crater debris on Mercury's surface hid the evidence, according to a study published Thursday (Sept. 10) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That size difference is important when researchers consider the planet's history, said Gaku Nishiyama, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center Institute of Space Research and an author of the study.

"Because Mercury's evolution is driven by its cooling, the amount of contraction — an indicator of the extent of cooling — is one of the most important observables that can be compared to models for estimating its evolution scenario," Nishiyama told Live Science in an email.

There could also be implications for the planet's composition. For example, more shrinkage at Mercury could mean the planet would have a larger metal core and fewer light elements, such as silicon, inside that core, according to an American Geophysical Union statement.

"The interior of Mercury would reflect its formation," Nishiyama said, and possibly hint at the innermost part of our solar system. "Therefore, to understand how our solar system has evolved up to now, information that can be extracted from this estimation — such as core composition and initial temperature condition — is critical."

A violent history

Mercury and the rest of the solar system planets formed due to the gradual collisions and aggregations of rock and gas upon asteroids and comets. Some of those impacts that created the planets also released a lot of heat. Mercury has been slowly cooling from those ancient impacts, and its interior has been shrinking along the way.

While this kind of cooling affects the entire planet's landscape, impact craters can mask the effects because each crash into the surface generates its own surface changes, including debris and new divots. The craters build up over time, making it difficult to spot more ancient geology underneath.

Nishiyama's team compared two sets of maps from Mercury, using data from NASA's MESSENGER mission, which orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015. One set of maps charted geological features showing contraction, and the other set estimated the roughness of the planet's surface. Their work covered the entire surface and demonstrated that the most rugged spots on the planet have fewer wrinkles from shrinking. In other words, according to Nishiyama, the debris from more recent impacts is covering up the evidence of shrinking.

Nishiyama said more information will help to confirm the estimate. Such data could come from the European Space Agency's BepiColombo spacecraft, which began its arrival sequence at Mercury earlier this month after nearly eight years of space travel. Once the mission settles in, the spacecraft will take higher-resolution imagery of the surface than MESSENGER did. Nishiyama's team expects BepiColombo to pick up smaller impact craters, as well as scarps and ridges, that could further refine the measurements.

"Stay tuned for future topography measurements by BepiColombo," Nishiyama said. "Future data from laser altimetry on BepiColombo will collect more information on planetary contraction by measuring topography more precisely."

There may be no better month to get outside and look at the stars than September, when warm evenings meet rapidly lengthening nights, the Milky Way remains visible overhead, and the changing seasons can increase your chances of seeing the northern lights.

For stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere, summer presents an obvious problem: Darkness arrives late. By September, however, sunset is getting noticeably earlier each evening, providing far more time under dark skies with mild weather in most locations. Days can still feel summery, while nights tend to remain pleasant enough to spend hours outside with a pair of stargazing binoculars or a good backyard telescope. The only challenge is finding a clear sky.

The balance between daylight and darkness changes particularly quickly around the fall equinox, which occurs on Sept. 22 this year. That's when the sun crosses Earth's equator, bringing day and night close to equal in length around the world. From then on, nights become longer than days across the Northern Hemisphere until the winter solstice on Dec. 21.

As an occasional bonus, auroras tend to occur more frequently around the equinoxes. During this time, the orientation of Earth's magnetic field creates favorable conditions for interactions with the solar wind (the cause of auroras), but there are never any guarantees.

September stargazing highlights

This month, there's plenty happening overhead.

All five planets visible to the naked eye can be seen during September, although not simultaneously; Venus and Mercury are visible in the evening, while Mars and Jupiter come out in the morning. Saturn is visible for much of the night, while Neptune reaches opposition on Sept. 26, meaning it is on the opposite side of Earth as the sun, offering the closest and most direct viewing opportunity.

The moon also passes close to several bright planets during the month (it passed Jupiter before dawn on Sept. 8 and will nudge Venus after dark on Sept. 13 and 14), while the full Harvest Moon rises on Sept. 26, with Saturn following after it minutes later.

September is also one of the last good opportunities of the year for Northern Hemisphere observers to see the brightest parts of the Milky Way in the evening. The star-rich regions of Sagittarius and Scorpius are sinking toward the western horizon, while the iconic Great Square of Pegasus rises in the East to announce the arrival of the autumn sky.

With all those cosmic treats on tap, this month certainly hits the sweet spot for stargazers.

New Hubble observations have revealed a dramatic, 10-sided jet surrounding Saturn's south pole, and it appears to be evolving before our eyes.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently snapped a high-resolution view of the striking "atmospheric wave," which appears to have begun forming in 2023, archival Hubble images show. Scientists are curious about how this "decagon" popped up so quickly, given that Saturn's other famous multisided wave — a hexagon at the north pole — has been observed on the planet for 40-plus years.

"The question is, why did it suddenly form now when we haven't seen one before?" Amy Simon, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and co-author of a new study describing the observations, said in a statement.

"The northern hexagon has been there every time we've looked for more than 40 years," Simon added. "This feature is different — it appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop."

Scientists can see the wave persisting through several atmospheric layers, which means it extends beyond the cloud tops. The wave is also found in a large jet stream at Saturn. More observations with Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be required to see how the wave is generated and what the decagon illustrates about atmospheres in large gas giants like Saturn.

The images were obtained as part of Hubble's Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, which uses some of the telescope's time to image the solar system's outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — once a year. The goal is to obtain long-term observations of these worlds, to supplement spacecraft orbiting or flying by.

From Earth's perspective, Saturn is slowly orbiting in its roughly 29-year journey of the sun so that its south pole is visible from our planet, allowing for a good view of the changing decagon. Hubble, in fact, was not the first to see signs of this decagonal shape; it was ground-based observatories that spotted a mysterious undulating band around Saturn’s south pole in 2024.

Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, first author of the study and a researcher in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of the Basque Country, and amateur astronomers Trevor Barry and Jean-Paul Oger first spotted the forming wave. The trio used the university's Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory, which brings in observations from around the world, to make the Saturnian discovery.

While more images in 2025 showed the wave starting to move into a decagon structure, Hubble was able to obtain high-resolution images without Earth's atmosphere in the way.

The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017, didn't see the feature, hinting that it hadn’t started forming yet, according to NASA. "Given Saturn's symmetry in its north-south jet stream system, we have been searching for a counterpart to Saturn's northern hexagon on the south pole in Hubble images since 1990," Sánchez-Lavega said.

Both Hubble and JWST are expected to provide more opportunities to look at the ringed planet's developing decagon in the near future. In the meantime, Saturn isn’t the only solar system planet with perplexing polar features; 2017 images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft showed that Jupiter’s south pole is studded with gigantic, oval-shaped cyclones that echo the chaos of the planet’s famous Great Red Spot.

An unassuming, brownish stone may be one of the most precious objects on Earth. The rare rock, called Teghaza 001, is a piece of ancient Mars and gives geoscientists an invaluable opportunity to study the planet's oldest material.

Now, a slew of recent studies based on evidence from the space rock are helping scientists understand more about the Red Planet's history of habitability.

Scientists believe that Earth and Mars coalesced around 4.5 billion years ago from the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust that surrounded our young sun. These two celestial siblings have since shared more than a few rocks in the intervening millions of millennia. Meteoroid impacts frequently gouge the Martian crust and have sent several hundred pieces of Mars hurtling to Earth — a free Mars return mission, paid for by the universe.

Two especially famous specimens include the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite, which contains tantalizing 4 billion-year-old organic molecules; and NWA 7034, a meteorite with 4.4 billion-year components and specks of ancient water.

But these Martian meteorites are lacking in a couple of respects. The former lacks mineral variety, and the latter appears to be a meteoritic mosaic that solidified from much older individual components, so neither faithfully represents some of Mars' oldest crust.

Teghaza 001, however, may help fill that knowledge gap.

Martian history right in our hands

The Teghaza 001 meteorite comprises 28 ounces (800 grams) of Martian material, split into eight pieces recovered in 2022 near the Taghaza archaeological area in Mali. It's owned by the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum.

In a preprint uploaded April 14, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, researchers measured the rate of multiple types of radioactive decay in different minerals, including tiny crystals called zircons, which are embedded within Teghaza 001, and found that the multiple measures agreed on an age at least 4.1 billion years ago. This may make the space rock the single oldest-known piece of Mars.

The space rock is rich in silica, suggesting that Mars may have been producing its own version of granite, which on Earth requires forces associated with plate tectonics. Granite must melt in extremely hot, pressurized subterranean conditions and then cool slowly, becoming lighter and eventually bubbling up through the ground to form the core of continents and the hearts of mountains.

But Mars has no tectonic plates, and its surface seems to be made of basalt, the dark, heavy volcanic rock that forms from quick-cooling lava — and also the stuff that makes the Hawaiian islands.

Are plate tectonics really necessary?

In a paper published June 26 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers revealed evidence that Mars may have been able to drive the geological processes that are mediated by plate tectonics on Earth.

The researchers used seismic data from NASA's InSight lander to model Mars' interior, and found evidence that it once housed huge, interconnected magma networks that may have stretched thousands of miles beneath its northern hemisphere.

"One of the big questions in planetary science is whether Earth is unique," study co-author Jon Wade, an associate professor of planetary materials at Oxford University, said in a statement.

"If Mars could develop this kind of complex crust without plate tectonics, then maybe the conditions needed for habitability can emerge on more planets than we realised, including those previously dismissed based on size or their apparent lack of tectonic activity," Wade added.

As a result, such processes may have helped early Mars develop an atmosphere, large bodies of water and potentially habitable conditions — a scenario that may be playing out elsewhere across the universe.

The solar system gives, and the solar system takes

While this may sound encouraging for the emergence of Martian life, Teghaza 001 also offered evidence that Mars began losing its water early in its history.

In a separate paper published June 10 in the journal Science Advances, researchers recreated Mars' hydrological evolution by tracing its hydrogen, a major constituent of water, by chemically analyzing a piece of Teghaza 001 and comparing it with two younger Martian meteorites.

To explore when Mars' water began seeping into space, the researchers examined the meteorites’ ratios of hydrogen to deuterium, a heavier version of hydrogen that contains a neutron in addition to the one proton and one electron that make up basic hydrogen atoms.

Because hydrogen is lighter, it more readily escapes into space, leaving behind a greater abundance of deuterium. The results "indicate that Mars lost a substantial proportion of its juvenile atmosphere to space within a few hundred million years after the magma ocean solidified," the researchers wrote in the study.

Importantly, this suggested that Mars was already rapidly losing its hydrogen into space by 4.1 billion years ago.

While Teghaza opens a rare window onto Mars’ earliest epochs, scientists urge that more samples are needed to truly understand Martian history. James Day, a professor of geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who was not involved in this research, noted that this finding is drawn from a small, rare piece of evidence. "I would caution that all of these arguments would have been based on a single small stone," he told Live Science in an email.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

Astronomers have found the strongest evidence yet that a rocky planet beyond our solar system has managed to hold onto an atmosphere — a crucial ingredient for life as we know it.

The discovery marks the first time scientists have detected an atmosphere surrounding a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of another star, the region around a star where temperatures could enable liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. The findings, published July 16 in the journal Science, could help astronomers narrow the search for potentially habitable worlds beyond our cosmic backyard.

"It's absolutely exciting," Edward Schwieterman, associate professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "We are getting closer to studying the atmospheres of worlds that could plausibly harbor life, with evidence of that life embedded in their observable spectra."

The planet, known as LHS 1140 b, lies about 48 light-years away from Earth and orbits a small, cool red dwarf star. At roughly 5.6 times Earth's mass, the exoplanet is classified as a super-Earth: a rocky planet larger than our own but much smaller than gas giants like Neptune.

It receives less than half the sunlight Earth gets, giving it an estimated surface temperature of around minus 53 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 47 degrees Celsius), according to previous estimates not accounting for an atmosphere. That makes the planet cold, but in the range astronomers consider potentially habitable.

Cosmic gas leak

Scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets over the past few decades, including many rocky worlds. But determining whether those planets have atmospheres has proven far more difficult, because atmospheres around rocky planets are incredibly thin compared with those of giant planets, making them much harder to detect across vast cosmic distances.

Instead of looking for the atmosphere directly, the researchers behind the new study searched for a subtle clue that one existed: helium gas leaking into space. Using the WINERED spectrograph on the Magellan Clay Telescope in Chile, the team watched LHS 1140 b cross in front of its star and let a sliver of starlight filter through the planet's atmosphere on its way to Earth. As it did, the team looked for a tiny dip in the star’s light at the exact wavelength of infrared light that helium blocks — a telltale sign that gas was streaming off the planet and into space.

The prediction rested entirely on a mathematical model that had never been confirmed for a rocky planet. However, in September 2024, the team caught LHS 1140 b and a smaller, hotter neighboring planet, LHS 1140 c, transiting their star on the same night, less than 40 minutes apart. The researchers detected a clear helium signal from LHS 1140 b, while LHS 1140 c showed nothing.

The contrast matters: LHS 1140 c orbits much closer to its star than LHS 1140 b does and receives roughly five times the radiation, yet it's also smaller and less gravitationally bound — conditions that should make any escaping gas easier, not harder, to spot. Finding nothing there suggests LHS 1140 c's atmosphere was stripped away long ago, while LHS 1140 b, sitting farther out in cooler, calmer conditions, has managed to hold onto its own.

The discovery addresses a question astronomers have been working to answer for decades.

"Twenty years ago we wondered whether other terrestrial-type planets even existed," study co-author Robin Wordsworth, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, said in a statement. "Then we learned they're common, and found some in the habitable zone. The next question was whether any of them had managed to keep an atmosphere. Now we know at least one has."

A step forward in the hunt for life

The find is especially notable because red dwarf stars like LHS 1140 can bombard nearby planets with high-energy radiation capable of stripping atmospheres away over time. Based on the star's estimated age of at least 3.1 billion years, the researchers say LHS 1140 b's atmosphere has likely persisted despite that bombardment, suggesting some rocky planets around these common stars can hang onto their atmospheres for far longer than once assumed.

But the researchers caution that detecting helium does not mean the planet is inhabited — or even that it is habitable. The observations reveal only the planet's thin upper atmosphere, not its full composition. Scientists still don't know whether LHS 1140 b has oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor or other gases that could make its surface more Earth-like and hospitable to life.

Instead, the discovery opens a new way to study distant rocky worlds.

"The study demonstrates that, at least in some cases, we will be able to begin characterizing the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets," Schwieterman said. "If only rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars retained atmospheres, we might have to wait one to two decades for the launch of the Habitable Worlds Observatory to search for biosignatures on rocky planets. I'm certainly excited about what comes next!"

Future observations will aim to determine what the rest of LHS 1140 b's atmosphere is made of and investigate whether it may harbor oceans or other features associated with habitability.

A hefty "super Earth" lurking in one of the closest star systems to our planet may be much better suited to supporting extraterrestrial life than scientists initially thought, a new study suggests. The alien world's relative proximity to Earth, and the nature of its home star, make it a prime candidate for follow-up observations, researchers say.

The exoplanet, dubbed GJ 3378b, was discovered in 2024 and orbits a red dwarf star around 25 light-years from our planet. The alien world circles its star every 21.5 days at a distance around 10 times closer than Earth orbits the sun, which would make it completely inhospitable in our solar system. But because the red dwarf emits around 90% less radiation than the sun does, GJ 3378b is slap bang in the middle of this star system’s "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the exoplanet's surface.

Researchers initially thought that GJ 3378b was around five times more massive than Earth. If the planet is rocky like ours, it would qualify as a "super Earth" — often considered the best candidates for sustaining extraterrestrial life. However, it was hard to tell if this world had a solid surface or was actually a mini gas giant. And even if it was rocky, its immense size would probably mean that its atmospheric pressure would be crushing, making it less likely to harbor life.

But in a new study, published June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers recalculated the exoplanet's size, using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument attached to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. This device measures subtle wobbles in the host star, caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets, and can be used to calculate the planet’s mass and trajectory.

This revealed that GJ 3378b is actually only 2.3 times more massive than Earth, which almost guarantees it is a rocky world and means it could have an atmosphere with a similar pressure to our own, raising the chances that extraterrestrial lifeforms could thrive there.

While researchers have found several other exoplanets that could harbor life, the fact that GJ 3378b is so close to us makes it particularly intriguing, as it will be easier to confirm whether it is truly habitable.

"This one’s exciting," study first author Paul Robertson, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. "25 light-years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, so in that respect it’s our next-door neighbor."

Before we get too carried away, there is still no evidence that GJ 3378b has an atmosphere or liquid water. Its proximity to its home star may mean that any atmosphere it once had was stripped away by stellar winds, similar to how solar radiation likely stripped Mars of its atmosphere and ancient oceans.

Therefore, more observations are needed. But if an atmosphere is detected, GJ 3378b would likely jump to near the front of the queue of exoplanets that researchers want to study further.

"If a planet in the habitable zone has a proper atmosphere, we can justify further research looking for biosignatures, liquid water or other signs of life," study co-author Gogod James, an undergraduate student at UC Irvine, said in the statement.

The fact that GJ 3378b orbits a red dwarf also makes it more appealing for future study because this is the most common star type in the Milky Way, so experts are keen to learn more about these stars' planetary systems and potential to nurture life.

"About 70% of stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, so they represent the standard," study co-author Michael Endl, an astronomer at the McDonald Observatory and the University of Texas at Austin, said in another statement. "It’s really important that we understand the planet population around these stars."

Researchers have found a new puzzle piece in Mars' geological history that hints that the Red Planet may have once harbored life. New data from NASA's Perseverance rover indicates that mudstones in Jezero crater contain a complex form of carbon, the chemical foundation of all known life. It's the highest concentration of organic molecules found on Mars to date.

Although the mere presence of carbon isn't proof that life once evolved on Mars, the location of the discovery adds to the excitement. This "macromolecular carbon" was discovered near other potential signs of life, or biosignatures, touted by NASA with great fanfare in 2025. This geological context adds credence to the case that microbes may have once colonized the Martian surface. The results were published Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Science Advances.

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Since then, the site has emerged as one of the most geologically interesting places on Mars. "Jezero crater was once fed water and sediment from rivers, and, billions of years ago, it hosted a lake," Ashley Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and co-author of the new study, told Live Science in an email.

It may have hosted more than that. A study published last year in the journal Nature found that some of the stones in an area of Jezero known as the Bright Angel outcropping contain clays and other minerals that are known to preserve fossils on Earth. One sample, in particular, raised eyebrows: a piece of a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls, whose patterns resemble those left by terrestrial microbes. Although these patterns could have been created by nonliving sources, NASA officials proclaimed it one of the clearest signs yet of past microbial life on the Red Planet.

The backbone of life

The new research builds on this work by confirming the widespread presence of complex carbon molecules in and around the Bright Angel outcrop. In the study, the researchers used the rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument to map the carbon distribution in these rocks and sediments. They compared them with carbon data from NASA's Curiosity rover taken at Gale crater some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, a distribution that suggests water may have been widespread on Mars in the deep past.

Murphy's team also determined that the carbon was not too weathered, indicating that it may have been exposed recently. However, it’s impossible to say whether the newly discovered carbon is related to life or not.

The work is an important step in unraveling Mars' geological history, including the planet's potential habitability and how water shaped its surface. But Murphy cautioned that it is far from a definitive answer.

"Macromolecular carbon on Mars does not prove the existence of life there," Murphy said. The molecules could indicate the presence of fossilized microbes, but they also could have formed through nonbiological means, like meteor strikes or running water.

Until scientists get their hands on a sample directly, it will be hard to tell exactly how this complex carbon arose and whether it represents a true biosignature. But that research may now be decades away — if it happens at all.

The Cheyava Falls sample was originally supposed to be brought to Earth in the 2030s as part of NASA and the European Space Agency's joint Mars Sample Return program. However, in its 2026 budget proposal, the Trump administration deemed the mission "financially unsustainable" and proposed slashing the project. Currently, the project is considered dead.

It may be China that gets the first shot at bringing Martian samples back to Earth for analysis. The country's Tianwen-3 sample-return mission will aim to collect several samples — albeit in a more accessible but less-promising site than where Perseverance has looked for biosignatures — in a mission due to launch no sooner than 2028.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

Something doesn’t quite add up about the orbits of our solar system’s eight planets and their hundreds of moons, a new study hints.

According to the research — which compared more than 100 simulations of our cosmic neighborhood’s early history — there may have once been two extra giant planets careening around the outer solar system, helping to reshape the orbits of the other planets before ultimately being kicked out into interstellar space.

The infant solar system was constantly being reshuffled. One drastic rearrangement, called the giant planet instability, may have caused the giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to migrate from their initial positions, ending up farther from the sun.

This migration, first proposed in 2005 by astronomers in Nice, France, as a part of the "Nice Model," likely started due to extra-close encounters between the planets and leftover planetary building blocks called planetesimals. Additionally, modifications proposed in 2011 suggested there may have been a fifth giant planet whose gravitational encounters with its neighbors ultimately tossed it out of our cosmic neighborhood.

However, astronomers don't know much about this missing planet. To find out more, the new study "systematically tested the effects of giant-planet close encounters on the orbital stability of their satellites," Matthew Clement, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the study's first author, told Live Science in an email.

Replaying cosmic history

For their analysis, the researchers turned to computer models of the early outer solar system. Each model tracked the trajectories of the giant planets and a thousand planetesimals over 20 million years.

From a previously constructed database of 100,000 of these models, the team identified a smaller subset of 122 simulations with final configurations broadly similar to those of the present-day giant planets. Roughly two-fifths of this subset's simulations started with five giant planets, while the remaining began with six. Then, the team "'re-played' these encounter sequences with the giant planets satellites in place," Clement said.

The simulations showed that the extra giant planet (or planets) ping-ponged among their neighbors, before finally being kicked out of the system. But the simulations also revealed an unexpected result: Jupiter's moons remained stable mostly in the simulations with two extra ice giants, while Uranus' moons remained stable in those with just one extra giant planet. In other words, Jupiter's and Uranus' moons appear to have been preserved in separate events ‪—‬ an outcome the researchers found surprising.

The scientists noted that three of Jupiter's big moons — Io, Europa and Ganymede — exist today in an intricate resonance of 1:2:4. In other words, Io completes four orbits of Jupiter for every two of Europa and one of Ganymede. Such a delicately balanced dance suggests that Jupiter's moons have remained largely untouched since they formed and thus favors the existence of two extra ice giant planets, the researchers said.

Planet ping-pong

While ping-ponging between the gas giants and Uranus, these supplemental planets likely destabilized Uranus' moons, causing them to collide. Such collisions would have at least partially fragmented the moons and vaporized volatile materials like ice, which later accumulated on the remnants, possibly explaining why Uranus' moon Miranda has 50% more ice than the planet's other moons, the researchers suggested.

But this isn't the only possibility. Two simulations yielded a scenario resembling the present-day solar system, in which both Jupiter's and Uranus' satellites survived the same instability. In those cases, only one extra ice giant planet was involved. Therefore, further simulations will be needed to discern whether there was one extra ice giant or two, the researchers said in the study.

Little can be inferred about the now-missing planets, except for their masses. In the five-giant-planet scenarios, the one extra planet had a mass similar to that of Neptune, while in the six-planet cases, the two extra planets had masses between those of Earth and Neptune, making them "super-Earths."

"Given that the masses are not too different from Uranus and Neptune, [the long-lost planets'] physical properties probably resembled those planets," study co-author Nathan Kaib, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, told Live Science by email.

Although the researchers aren't planning to actively research the fugitive planets, they will continue studying Uranus' moons to identify signatures that show they were disrupted and to determine "the actual consequences of what happens if the satellites do go unstable," Clement said.

The team’s research was published online March 25 in the journal Icarus.

See how well you know our planetary neighborhood with our solar system quiz!

Throughout its history, Earth has been bombarded with countless meteorites. About 80,000 have been found so far, but one specific group is exceedingly rare — and scientists now think they could be evidence for a long-dead proto-world that used to orbit the sun.

That rare group is the "angrites," which account for just 0.09% of all meteorites. They’re among the oldest known rocks in the solar system, forming within just a few million years after the solar system began 4.56 billion years ago. They also contain exceptionally low levels of silica (silicon dioxide), which is a key ingredient of most asteroids and rocky planets.

One angrite meteorite, dubbed NWA 12774, (pictured here in cross-polarized light) was discovered in the Sahara Desert in 2019. And a new study into this space rock suggests that it could be the first definitive evidence of a long-lost protoplanet that once existed in the early solar system. (NWA stands for Northwest Africa, a designation given to every meteorite found in this region.)

The findings, published July 1 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, hint that this “planetary embryo” — if it existed — was made of angrite and may have been as big as the moon or even Mars. It’s thought to have orbited the sun before crashing into another celestial body and shattering into rubble billions of years ago; cue angrite meteorites falling to Earth.

In addition to its low silica content, NWA 12774 contains clinopyroxene, a mineral commonly found in Earth’s crust and mantle. This clinopyroxene is also unusually rich in aluminum, indicating that it formed under extremely high pressure — possibly a high-energy collision.

Such pressures could not have existed inside a small asteroid, hinting that the parent body of the angrites must have had a radius of at least 621 miles (1,000 kilometers), the researchers wrote. The sharp edges on NWA 12774 further suggest it formed near the surface, implying the parent body was even larger — with a radius of up to 1,118 miles (1,800 km). For comparison, Earth’s moon has a radius of 1,080 miles (1,737 km), and Mars has 2,106 miles (3,390 km).

“It’s incredible to think there was once [another] world this large,” study first author Aaron Bell, a petrologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. “We only know it existed because a few fragments of it happened to land on Earth. These meteorites preserved evidence of a completely different pathway through which early planets developed.”

Due to the lack of silica in the angrites, scientists had previously theorized that these meteorites originated from small asteroids. But the new findings challenge that view.

If they did originate from a protoplanet, then the world that could have formed from this "embryo" would have likely looked much different than the rocky planets we see today.

“The materials that formed the angrite parent body are fundamentally different from the ingredients of Earth and Mars,” said Bell. “It points to a distinct and separate evolutionary path in planetary formation in the early history of our solar system.”

It is unclear exactly what happened to the lost protoplanet. However, the researchers speculate that some of its fragments may have become the building blocks of other terrestrial planets, including Earth.

See more Space Photos of the Week

In a first-of-its-kind discovery, astronomers claim they have directly measured the magnetic fields of multiple planets beyond our solar system — potentially providing a crucial new tool in the search for habitable planets and alien life.

Magnetic fields exert a vital influence on planetary atmospheres and, therefore, their ultimate fate and prospects for habitability. We know, for example, that Earth's magnetic field has long protected our planet from harmful radiation, allowing our world to become a flourishing blue-green planet while inert Mars has grown barren and ostensibly dead.

The importance of a guardian magnetosphere is clearly evident. Yet magnetic fields on exoplanets, or alien worlds that orbit stars beyond our solar system, have remained poorly constrained, until now.

In a study published Tuesday (June 2) in the journal Nature Astronomy, a massive, multinational team of astronomers observed seven sizzling planets and found that their winds were slower than expected, suggesting that magnetic fields were slowing them down.

"This breakthrough opens a completely new window on exoplanet research," study co-author Julia Seidel, an astronomer at the Lagrange Laboratory in Nice, France, said in a statement. "It's the first time we can compare the magnetic environments of other worlds — a key step toward ultimately understanding which planets can stay alive, keep their water, and perhaps even, one day, host life as we know it."

Unexpected astronomy

The researchers were not specifically seeking exoplanetary magnetic fields. Instead, they sought to determine whether winds throughout the cosmos behave similarly on hot planets.

So they focused on seven "ultra-hot Jupiters," or sizzling gas giants swirling so close to their stellar parents that they're tidally locked, with one side always facing their star and the other side perpetually drenched in darkness.

Under such intense stellar irradiation, these seven planets attain estimated equilibrium temperatures of approximately 2,600 Kelvin (over 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit), whipping up unimaginable winds ranging from nearly 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers) per hour to almost 16,000 mph (25,000 kmh). For comparison, our own not-so-hot Jupiter only manages to power winds to a relatively tame 900 mph (1,500 kmh).

The researchers clocked these otherworldly wind speeds using the ESPRESSO instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and the MAROON-X instrument on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

These are both spectrographs, which are tools that split a celestial object's light into its constituent wavelengths to reveal its atmospheric composition. Accordingly, these observations allowed the astronomers to measure wind speeds by tracing the movement of iron through the atmospheres of these exoplanets.

A counterintuitive discovery

In doing so, they revealed several surprises. First, wind speeds on these hot, gassy planets actually declined with temperature — the hotter the planet, the lower the wind speed.

"This is totally counterintuitive because, all things being equal, hot planets have more energy to accelerate the winds," study co-author Vivien Parmentier, an astronomer and professor at Lagrange Laboratory, explained in a separate statement. "Something must happen that slows down the wind speeds for hotter objects."

The researchers concluded that the magnetic fields may be responsible for putting the "brakes" on these winds, by slowing the movement of charged particles in the atmospheres of these exoplanets.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the research suggests that these magnetic fields are only several gauss in strength — rather than hundreds of gauss, as predicted by some models. Such values are on par with the much colder gas giants in our solar system. This finding may therefore also help to reconcile predictive models for planetary magnetic fields.

Overall, this breakthrough study may set the standard for detecting magnetic fields around planets beyond our own. Applying this technique elsewhere could guide future searches for potentially habitable worlds, an ever-appealing prospect as next-generation facilities begin aiming their electric eyes toward other possible Earths throughout the universe.

A phenomenon that was thought to be impossible on Mars is squeezing the Red Planet's atmosphere like toothpaste from a tube, a new study finds. The surprising discovery, uncovered by a NASA spacecraft during a powerful solar storm, could change how we think of dangerous space weather throughout the solar system, researchers say.

The unlikely phenomenon, dubbed the Zwan-Wolf effect, was first discovered on Earth in 1976 and occurs when "charged particles are squeezed like toothpaste coming out of a tube along magnetic structures called flux tubes," NASA representatives wrote in a statement. These flux tubes are located within Earth's magnetosphere, the invisible field that is generated by the movements of our planet's molten metal core and shields us from radiation.

While similar phenomena likely occur on Jupiter and Saturn, experts have long assumed that the Zwan-Wolf effect could not happen on Mars because our next-door neighbor's core has long since solidified and, therefore, does not generate a proper magnetosphere. (This is also why the Red Planet has such a thin and wispy atmosphere; without magnetic shielding, most of its gases have been stripped away by solar storms.)

But in the new study, published May 18 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2014 (though NASA lost contact with it last year), and found something strange.

In December 2023, a powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) erupted from the sun and slammed into Mars, temporarily scrambling the remnants of its upper atmosphere and revealing disturbances that could be explained only by the Zwan-Wolf effect.

"When investigating the data, I all of a sudden noticed some very interesting wiggles," study lead author Christopher Fowler, a planetary scientist at West Virginia University, said in the statement. "I would never have guessed it would be this effect," he added.

Unlike on Earth, where the Zwan-Wolf effect occurs tens of thousands of miles above our planet's surface, the Martian equivalent occurs in the ionosphere — the upper part of the atmosphere, which is full of ionized gas, or plasma — at an altitude of around 125 miles (200 kilometers).

"No one expected that this effect could even occur in the atmosphere," Fowler said. "That's what makes this even more exciting."

Mars' Zwan-Wolf effect is likely powered by a localized magnetic field at the boundary where solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that shoots from the sun — collides with ionospheric plasma, the researchers wrote. This means it is probably happening all the time, but we only realized it now because the radiation from the CME exaggerated the effect.

As a result, experts are keen to study this phenomenon further to better understand how it may impact future missions to Mars, since changes to the ionosphere will likely affect orbiting spacecraft, communications equipment, and the levels of harmful radiation that reach the planet's surface.

"Knowing how space weather interacts with Mars is essential," study co-author Shannon Curry, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and the principal investigator for MAVEN, said in the statement. It is, therefore, vitally important to understand "these links between our host star and the Red Planet," she added.

Now that we know the Zwan-Wolf effect can occur within planetary atmospheres, we may also soon discover it on other solar system worlds, such as Venus and Saturn's largest moon, Titan, the researchers hypothesized.

Bizarre Venus surface formations (or coronae) are likely key to understanding our twin planet's heretofore inscrutable interior. Using NASA Magellan spacecraft data from decades past, Anna Gulcher, an earth and planetary scientist at Germany's University of Freiburg, have created innovative new 3D models of the largest coronae to better understand Venus' puzzling geodynamics.

The team used data from the Magellan spacecraft's radar sensors, which officially ceased functioning in 1994, to get a closer look at the coronae's surrounding topography and gravitational signatures.

Coronae display extraordinary diversity in size, morphology, topography, gravity signatures, and tectonic setting, indicating that they do not represent a single formation mechanism, but instead reflect a spectrum of dynamic processes, Gulcher and colleagues write in a paper presented at the European Geosciences Union's 2026 General Assembly in Vienna.

The updated database includes 741 coronae which span Venus' surface.

They are huge circles of fracture systems that we think are basically the surface expression of a plume of hot material moving upwards from the interior of the planet, Gulcher told me at EGU26 in Vienna.

Understanding these structures is critical not only for deciphering Venus' geodynamic regime, but also for assessing whether similar processes may have operated on the early Earth, Gulcher and colleagues write in the EGU paper.

By combining gravity and topographic data with geodynamic simulations, the study identifies possible warm mantle upwellings beneath 52 coronae and presents perhaps the strongest evidence that different plume-related tectonic processes occur there, says Gulcher. The work also shows that current gravity data can miss many active tectonic signals, meaning activity on Venus could be more widespread than currently detectable, she says.

As For Why They Are Circular?

We think they are formed by something circular in shape from the interior, says Gulcher. A magma plume, for instance, that is hotter than the surrounding material can cause a lot of uplift of the crust, which creates these rings, she says.

The coronae are thought to have been the result of a lot of mantle convection.

Mantle convection is the movement of the mantle (or rocky layer between the core and crust) of any planet, where it can spread outwards and drive plates to move laterally, says Gulcher. It's the cycle of upward and downward movement of the mantle over a very long time scales, she says.

Planetary scientists still debate whether Venus ever had any geophysical process resembling atmospheric carbon recycling. The most significant would have been full-scale plate tectonics, the theory that ascribes our planet's lithosphere as being divided into giant moving plates. The idea is that such plates frequently collide causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions as well as the continuous recycling of carbon in and out of our atmosphere.

Earth is beyond fortunate for having the unique ability to evolve plate tectonics, which enabled our atmosphere to remain stable over billions of years. Plate tectonics is arguably what differentiates the ability of any given rocky planet to evolve intelligent life.

On Earth, carbon is recycled back into the mantle very efficiently, says Gulcher.

That's in part because large scale water oceans at Earth’s surface created hydrous (or water rich) rocks. Such rocks are prone to become weaker and more pliable much faster than lithospheric rocks on a dry planet like Venus. In fact, Venus may never have had a large water ocean; that's an important conundrum that upcoming missions to Venus' surface hope to solve.

It's now thought that such water oceans are what's needed to create plate boundaries. That's when a planet's lithospheric rocks become much more pliable and thus more prone to break up and separate into separate into movable tectonic plates.

In contrast, without oceans, Venus likely only had very limited carbon recycling via tectonic and resurfacing processes, says Gulcher.

More details should come with future in situ data taken at Venus.

Future missions, such as VERITAS and EnVision, will significantly enhance our ability to analyze coronae with unprecedented detail in surface and subsurface structure, and increased topographic and gravity resolution, Gulcher and colleagues noted in a 2025 paper in the journal JGR Planets.

As For Earth?

Plate tectonics have been stable here on Earth for at least 3 billion years, says Gulcher. This global destruction of material and formation of material allowed our planet to lose a lot of heat and also to recycle material back into the mantle, she says. This continuous cycle allowed our planet to have stable surface conditions over billions of years, says Gulcher.

What haunts Gulcher most about Venus?

We see structures on Venus that are so earthlike yet also show a few very important differences, says Gulcher. With the available data, we don't fully understand how it can look so similar but be so different, she says.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

Jupiter's giant moon Ganymede is the only known moon to have its own magnetic field — and it may be heating up in a process "not yet observed anywhere else," new research suggests.

One of the four Galilean satellites swirling around Jupiter, Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system. At nearly 3,300 miles (5,300 kilometers) in diameter, it's more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) wider than Earth's moon and slightly bigger than Mercury, our tiniest planetary tot. (Jupiter has more than 100 confirmed moons, with the largest four known as the Galilean moons.)

This standout satellite's intrinsic magnetic field — discovered by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in 1996 — is generated through a process called a dynamo, powered by the electrically conductive, churning liquid iron in its core.

Yet the mechanism through which this process emerged is hotly debated.

"Many formation studies suggest that Ganymede formed too cold to start with a metal core," study co-author Kevin Trinh, a planetary scientist at Caltech, said in a statement. "Meanwhile, many modeling studies of Ganymede's dynamo assume that Ganymede formed its metal core roughly when the moon itself formed, as Earth did. Both of these things cannot be simultaneously true."

So, in a paper published May 6 in the journal Science Advances, researchers propose a new topsy-turvy mechanism that may have formed Ganymede's mysterious metallic core and dynamo later rather than earlier, as molten iron blobs sank into the massive moon's core. This activity may be ongoing today.

Hot or cold start?

The "warming-driven dynamo" presented in the study is the opposite of traditional dynamo-origin ideas, which propose that they form early in large bodies like Earth and then gradually cool.

For example, metallic core formation in planetary bodies is thought to have occurred within around 200 million years of the solar system's formation. Yet moons may be too small to hold enough heat from their birth to power this process.

But all hope is not lost, because a body formed from a "cold start" may still be able to grow a magnetic-field-generating core, the researchers' new model suggests.

This model integrates and simplifies Ganymede's characteristics, such as its composition and core temperature, assuming its core is composed of iron and iron sulfide, because these components have lower melting temperatures.

In this model, molten metal blobs sink into Ganymede's innards to feed its core and whip up its magnetic field. They are warmed through two main mechanisms: radioactive heating and tidal heating.

First, as heavier radioactive isotopes decay into lighter elements, they release heat. Second, Jupiter's gigantic gravitational influence squeezes and stretches Ganymede as the moon whirls nearer and farther from its parent, as if "kneading" a planet-size piece of rocky, icy dough. The resulting inner friction generates heat. This heat powers the dynamo that gives Ganymede its magnetic field.

Altogether, this hypothesis does not preclude the possibility that Ganymede formed with a magnetic-field-producing core.

Alien implications?

But if "cold start" cores exist throughout the universe, it could present a previously unexplored process for magnetic fields to form and protect aging worlds, perhaps facilitating an intriguing implication in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Magnetic fields are necessary to protect life from harmful solar and cosmic radiation, making them a prerequisite in most searches for habitable planets. But a little magnetism can go a long way: As is apparent on Earth, with a magnetic field significantly weaker than a fridge magnet, even a modest magnetosphere can transform the outlook of planetary bodies.

"There could be young rocky exoplanets or exoplanets with lower radioactive isotope abundances (i.e., slower heating) that would be favorable for a recent warming-driven dynamo," Trinh told Live Science in an email. "The challenge is that no one has detected an exoplanet dynamo so far."

Is it just us, or is the Red Planet looking a lot bluer than usual?

NASA's Psyche spacecraft returned this colorful snapshot of Mars after completing a close flyby of the planet last week, marking a major milestone in the probe's long journey to the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche. The spacecraft passed within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the Martian surface on May 15, taking a suite of color images, including this close-up of the double-ringed Huygens crater and the heavily cratered southern highlands surrounding it.

Aside from the image of Huygens crater, Psyche obtained close-ups of wind blowing over craters in the Syrtis Major region and a high-resolution view of the water-ice-rich south polar cap of Mars.

In other spectacular images taken as Psyche approached and departed the planet, Mars appears as a thin crescent — a rare perspective afforded by Psyche's high angle of approach. Researchers also observed sunlight scattering through Mars' dusty atmosphere, creating a brighter-than-expected glow around the edge of the planet. As it left the vicinity of the Red Planet, Psyche got an image of an almost fully lit Mars, which included its south polar cap and the Valles Marineris canyon.

"We've captured thousands of images of the approach to Mars and of the planet's surface and atmosphere," Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead and a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, said in a NASA statement. It was part of an effort to calibrate Psyche's multispectral cameras well in advance of its arrival at asteroid 16 Psyche. "As the spacecraft continues its journey after the flyby, we'll continue calibration imaging of Mars for the rest of the month as it recedes into the distance," Bell added.

NASA's solar-powered Psyche mission launched Oct. 13, 2023, on a complex route to the asteroid belt. The quickest way to get somewhere in the solar system isn't to use propellant to fly directly but to slingshot around a moon or planet, effectively using gravity and orbital motion to accelerate a spacecraft. 16 Psyche is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where it orbits the sun about three times farther away than Earth does.

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the recent Martian flyby increased Psyche's speed by approximately 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h) and shifted its orbital plane by about 1 degree relative to the sun.

Following the maneuver, NASA engineers used the agency's Deep Space Network to confirm that the spacecraft remains on the correct trajectory for its scheduled arrival at asteroid Psyche in August 2029, where it will go into orbit and conduct detailed mapping and scientific observations. The asteroid is thought to be the exposed core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.

The abundant metals on the asteroid are thought to be worth many quadrillions of dollars — though, at the moment, there is no feasible plan for extracting them.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

One of Neptune's largest moons has stuck around the neighborhood much longer than scientists previously thought — in fact, it may be the sole survivor of the planet's earliest days.

Nereid, Neptune's third-largest moon, is probably the only moon left over from when the ice giant formed early in the solar system's 4.5 billion-year history, a new analysis of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data suggests.

The results, published Wednesday (May 20) in the journal Science Advances, contradict the previous story about Nereid's history told in the decades since its 1949 discovery: that Neptune "captured" the 220-mile-wide (350 kilometers ) moon from an icy well of bodies in the outer solar system known as the Kuiper Belt.

JWST's observations were key to this realization, said first study author Matthew Belyakov, a graduate student in planetary science at Caltech. "What JWST did for Nereid is it confirmed that it had a lot of water ice, and gave us the overall shape of the spectrum [of light]," Belyakov told Live Science in a phone call.

The telescope's observations of the moon revealed a composition that's significantly different from that of known Kuiper Belt objects, he continued. Crucially, JWST has been in space long enough to allow direct comparisons against Kuiper Belt worlds that the telescope itself has observed. "We're able to compare apples to apples," Belyakov added.

The moon-stealing planet

Previously, astronomers assumed that Nereid was "captured" by Neptune's gravity, like the planet's other known moons are suspected to have been. This is due to Nereid's orbit, which is highly elliptical — suggesting the moon was snatched from a previous, more stable orbit in the Kuiper Belt.

But that hypothesis is challenging to prove, given that Neptune has 16 known moons. Most of those moons are small, aside from Triton, which is slightly smaller than Earth's moon. The system is made up largely of small moons in irregular orbits.

"The trouble at Neptune is that we don't have any regular satellites really, whatsoever," Belyakov said.

Triton, Neptune's largest moon, represents 99% of the Neptunian moon system's mass and is on a "retrograde," or backward, orbit, Belyakov added. Triton is clearly a captured object ‪—‬ not only because of its odd orbit but also because observations have shown that its composition is more similar to Pluto's than to Neptune's, he said.

In the new study, the authors ran simulations of Triton's capture from the Kuiper Belt and how it may have affected the existing moons of Neptune. The simulations show that Triton's arrival gave the original Neptune moons a tremendous kick. "Triton gets captured and alters the original system, and creates a Nereid-like object," Belyakov explained.

Moon mysteries

To shore up this theory, Belyakov hopes to get a better look at Nereid in higher resolution. JWST is in high demand by astronomers, and Belyakov's team, which includes noted moon dynamicist and Caltech professor Konstantin Batygin, got a few minutes of telescope time using the lowest-resolution mode of JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). The team plans to submit an application for use of a higher-resolution mode of NIRSpec in a future call for telescope observations, he said.

These observations have implications not only for Neptune but also studies of exoplanets and gas giants, Belyakov emphasized.

"The big picture is that really we don't quite understand how moons around Uranus and Neptune form," Belyakov said. "What we're finding generally, in the study of exoplanets, is that planets of the size of Uranus and Neptune are pretty much the most common type of planet. And so if we don't understand how moons around these objects form, that's a really big problem."

The histories of Uranus and Neptune are making the study more challenging, he noted. Uranus is weirdly tilted on its side, perhaps due to a big collision with another object eons ago, which means its first generation of moons likely no longer exists.

"And at Neptune, we're also missing that first generation of moons," Belyakov said.The planet's innermost moons today were reforged from the original generation of moons that broke apart in the wake of Triton's arrival, the authors noted.

"So perhaps," he continued, "Nereid is the only original, sort of intact, remnant of satellites that originally formed around these planets. That would be a very exciting result, because it means that we have this one window to explore and understand satellites."

The scientists operating NASA's Curiosity rover are breathing a sigh of relief after successfully removing a troublesome rock that got stuck on the end of the Mars rover's robotic arm for nearly a week. Video footage shows the robot "struggling" to shake off its pesky passenger by tilting, rotating and vibrating its metallic limb.

The first-of-its-kind fiasco began when Curiosity came across a fairly innocuous-looking rock, dubbed Atacama (after the Chilean desert on Earth), while exploring the slopes of Mount Sharp, which stands at the heart of Gale crater, near the Red Planet's equator. The rock was around 1.5 feet (46 centimeters) in diameter, 6 inches (15 cm) thick and approximately 28.6 pounds (13 kilograms), making it an ideal candidate for further analysis.

On April 25, Curiosity attempted to drill into Atacama to extract a sample that might be analyzed within its onboard "wet chemistry" laboratory. Although the robot's drill arm successfully bored into the rock, it quickly became clear that something had gone wrong.

"When the rover retracted its arm, the entire rock lifted out of the ground, suspended by the fixed sleeve that surrounds the rotating drill bit," NASA representatives wrote in a statement. "Drilling has fractured or separated the upper layers of rocks in the past, but a rock has never remained attached to the drill sleeve."

This posed an entirely new problem to the scientists controlling Curiosity, who "went to work to develop a plan to extract the drill bit from the rock," Bill Farrand, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who worked on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, wrote in a NASA blog post. But this ended up being something of a "struggle," he wrote.

The Curiosity team initially tried to remove Atacama by "vibrating the drill to shake off the rock," but they were unsuccessful. On April 29, they tried to vibrate the drill while reorienting the arm. However, this only managed to shake tiny, sand-like fragments off the rock.

Finally, on May 1, the rock dislodged after the team attempted "tilting the drill more," as well as rotating, vibrating and spinning the drill bit. They had planned to do this multiple times. However, the rock separated at the first attempt and fell back to the Martian surface, Farrand wrote.

Images show that Atacama fractured into at least two pieces upon impacting the ground.

Unfortunately, the sample, or drill tailings, were "lost from Atacama as part of the effort to dislodge the drill bit from the rock," Farrand wrote. The Curiosity team is, therefore, "seeking a more firmly rooted drill target in order to collect drill tailings for analysis," he added.

A busy few months

Curiosity has been through a lot since it first landed on Mars in 2012, but the past few months have been particularly eventful for the wandering robot.

In late April, researchers revealed that the rover had collected seven organic molecules at once — the largest single haul on Mars to date — to go along with a "giant string" of hydrocarbons discovered in February. (Both of these findings offer clues about the potential for ancient alien life on the Red Planet.)

A few weeks earlier, in early April, Curiosity also snapped photos of dozens of what look like "dragon scales" scattered across the ground. And in March, the robot found ruby-like crystals hidden within rocks similar to Atacama.

Prior to these findings, the rover had spent more than six months closely studying a series of ridge-like features, dubbed boxwork, which look like giant rocky spiderwebs zigzagging across the Red Planet's surface, and, most recently, discovered that they are covered in tiny, egg-like structures.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Astronauts could complete a round trip to Mars in less than a year someday, potentially cutting current mission timelines in half, according to a new study that drew inspiration from asteroid trajectories.

Under current mission profiles, reaching Mars, which is located about 50% farther from the sun than Earth is, takes roughly seven to 10 months. Because Earth and Mars align for fuel-efficient transfers only every 26 months, astronauts must wait for a return window, stretching a full round trip to nearly three years.

However, the new findings, published online in the journal Acta Astronautica in April, suggest that early, imprecise orbital estimates of near-Earth asteroids — which were historically used to assess impact risks, before being discarded in favor of more precise data — may contain valuable geometric clues for designing faster interplanetary routes.

"Maybe this can change the idea that we need more than two years to go to Mars and return," study author Marcelo de Oliveira Souza, a cosmologist at the State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, told Live Science.

"I was not looking for this"

Souza first stumbled on the idea in 2015, when he was studying near-Earth asteroids. One object in particular, 2001 CA21, caught his attention because early estimates suggested it followed a rare path crossing both Earth's and Mars' orbital zones.

Although later measurements refined the asteroid's true trajectory, its initial geometry during the October 2020 opposition — when Earth and Mars were aligned on the same side of the sun, and closest together in their orbits — hinted at the possibility of "ultra-short" routes between the two planets, Souza noted in the paper.

"This was a surprise for me — I was not looking for this," he told Live Science.

As more observations allow astronomers to refine an asteroid's orbit, those early trajectories change, so someone analyzing it later wouldn't have seen the same path, Souza added. "Maybe I was in the right place at the right time," he said.

Round trip to Mars?

For the October 2020 opposition, Souza's calculations showed that a very fast, roughly 34-day trip from Earth to Mars is geometrically possible if a spacecraft follows a path similar to the asteroid's early orbital plane.

However, such a trajectory would require departure speeds of around 32.5 kilometers per second, well beyond current rocket capabilities, and a spacecraft would arrive at Mars traveling around 64,800 mph (108,000 km/h) — too fast for existing landing systems to handle safely, Souza noted in the paper.

Instead, Souza used the asteroid-inspired geometry to explore possible trips during future Mars oppositions in 2027, 2029 and 2031. By using a standard method for calculating paths between two points in space (called the Lambert analysis) and constraining those paths to remain within about 5 degrees of the asteroid's orbital tilt, Souza found that only the 2031 alignment offered a viable opportunity for rapid travel using near-term technology.

In that window, a round-trip mission from Earth to Mars could be completed in just 153 days, or roughly five months, according to the study.

In that scenario, a spacecraft would depart Earth on April 20, 2031, at about 27 kilometers per second, arrive at Mars by May 23 after a 33-day journey, spend about 30 days on the surface, depart June 22 and return to Earth by Sept. 20, with the return leg taking roughly 90 days.

Souza also identified a lower-energy alternative within the same window, requiring a launch at about 16.5 kilometers per second for a mission lasting about 226 days, or about 7.5 months ‪—‬ still significantly shorter than current mission timelines.

Still, the concept remains largely theoretical and would depend heavily on mission specifics — including spacecraft design, payload mass and propulsion capabilities — all of which would shape whether such fast transfers are feasible in practice.

The method, however, could still prove useful as a way to narrow the search for viable trajectories. The required velocities are comparable to those achieved by missions such as New Horizons — the NASA probe, which, when launched in 2006 on a mission to flyby Pluto at 16.26 kilometers per second, was the fastest human-made object ever launched from Earth.

Such high-speed trajectories could be within the reach of next-generation rockets such as SpaceX's Starship or Blue Origin's New Glenn, Souza told Live Science.

What do you know about the Red Planet? Test your knowledge with our Mars quiz!

Scientists may have detected more than 10,000 never-before-seen exoplanets in a single survey, potentially tripling the number of known alien worlds in one fell swoop. The record-breaking haul was possible thanks to a new algorithm that helped researchers analyze more than 80 million stars — revealing subtle clues that would otherwise be "impossible" for us to see.

Since the first alien planet was spotted in 1995, the number of exoplanet discoveries has slowly risen in line with new technologies, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which are better equipped to spot these weird alien worlds. In September 2025, astronomers revealed that the number of confirmed exoplanets had surpassed 6,000, and nearly 300 have been added to the list since then, according to NASA.

But in a new study uploaded April 20 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that they've uncovered an astonishing 11,554 exoplanet candidates at once. If all of them can be confirmed, it would bring the total number of exoplanets to nearly 18,000, which is almost triple the current total. (The study has not been peer-reviewed yet.)

Using a machine learning algorithm, the team analyzed the light curves of precisely 83,717,159 stars captured by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a car-sized space telescope that has been circling Earth since 2018. By looking for subtle dips in the stars' brightness, astronomers can tell when a planet has likely passed in front of, or transited, its home star.

This revealed more than 11,000 exoplanet candidates, of which 10,052 had never been seen before. (Other scientists had previously identified the rest, but they are not yet confirmed as exoplanets.) Around 87% of the candidates were spotted transiting twice or more, allowing the researchers to calculate the planets' orbital periods, which range from 0.5 to 27 days, according to StellarCatalog.com.

But the researchers didn't stop there. To test the validity of their model, they attempted to confirm one of the new candidates themselves.

Using one of the 21-foot (6.5 meters) Magellan telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert, the team identified a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet, dubbed TIC 183374187 b, that orbits a star around 3,950 light-years from Earth — right where the algorithm predicted.

The confirmation of TIC 183374187 b hints that at least a few of the other exoplanet candidates will also end up being confirmed. However, first these planets must be verified by independent surveys and studied in greater detail, which can take months or years to do properly.

Finding "impossible" planets

TESS was specifically designed to detect transiting objects, and it has already discovered 882 confirmed exoplanets — roughly 14% of the current total — so it may seem strange that no one has seen most of the new candidates until now. However, there is a good reason why.

Most researchers prioritize analyzing the light curves of the brightest stars in the TESS dataset, because transit events for these stars are much more noticeable and easier to confirm. But there are many more faint stars that end up being captured in the telescope's wide-field photos.

In the new study, the researchers looked at every star — up to 16 magnitudes dimmer than the normal threshold for a transit study — from TESS' first wide-field image. The researchers call this idea the T16 project.

The extreme dimness of these light curves makes it extraordinarily hard to spot potential transit events, which is why they are normally overlooked. To overcome this hurdle, the team created a machine learning algorithm that learned to distinguish subtle clues that a transit had potentially occurred. (Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence where computers learn from data to make predictions, rather than being explicitly programmed.)

A computer program also allowed the team to analyze the enormous dataset, which would "be impossible" for humans to sort through on their own, Universe Today reported.

"This work shows that large-scale, machine-learning-assisted transit searches can significantly expand the census of transiting planet candidates, particularly around faint stars," researchers wrote in the paper.

Unfortunately, the brief orbital periods of the exoplanet candidates hint that they are probably too close to their home stars to support life as we know it. (This is because more distant planets orbit their stars less often and are less likely to align with an observer for a transit.)

A section of Mars is covered in a surprising number of features that look like clumps of giant, fossilized reptile scales, new photos reveal. But don't be alarmed ‪—‬ the strange structures did not originate from monstrous aliens. Instead, they may have ties to ancient water.

NASA's Curiosity rover snapped the photos of the peculiar rocks as it was driving toward Antofagasta — a relatively young, 33-foot-wide (10 meters) impact crater located on the slopes of Mount Sharp (also called Aeolis Mons), which stands in the larger Gale crater, near Mars' equator.

A pair of black-and-white photos of the "scales" was released by NASA April 14, while a close-up color image of the rocks was shared online the next day by Kevin M. Gill, a software and spaceflight engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who specializes in image processing. (The pics were captured April 7 and April 13, respectively — also called Sol 4859 and Sol 4865 in Martian time.)

The unusual shape and tight clustering of these rocks have drawn comparisons to the scales of reptiles such as crocodilians, while some commenters joked that the formations look dragon-like.

It is currently unclear how many of the scale-like rocks were photographed or how large they are, but they stretched across the ground "for meters and meters," according to an April 10 NASA blog post.

Although the researchers were not shocked to see these multifaced rocks, or "polygons," they were surprised by the sheer quantity of them in the area.

"Many of the rocks we've driven over have these incredible textures — thousands of honeycomb-shaped polygons crisscross their surface," Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist at JPL, wrote in the blog post. "We've seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn't seem quite this dramatically abundant."

Polygons with a similar honeycomb-like shape have been seen before on Mars on both smaller and larger scales. In these past instances, the shapes were often tied to the drying of wet mud or ice crystals moving beneath the Martian surface. However, it is too early for scientists to tell exactly how the latest shapes formed.

Curiosity has collected "lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed," Fraeman said.

Animal impostors

Before reaching Antofagasta, Curiosity spent the better part of a year studying a series of rocky ridges on Mount Sharp dubbed "boxwork." These features are also known as Martian "spiderwebs" because of how they zigzag across the ground, and the wandering robot recently spotted tiny, egg-like spheroids stuck to their sides. (The "webs" should not be confused with the infamous "Spiders on Mars," which are dark, arachnid-like features that litter the planet's surface.)

Since landing on the Red Planet in 2012, the rover has also snapped a series of other objects that look suspiciously animal-like, including a surprisingly realistic coral-like rock formation.

NASA's other Mars rover, Perseverance, has also seen its fair share of faux creatures since touching down in 2021, including a statuesque "turtle" poking its head out of a shell. And the fleet of spacecraft orbiting Mars has spied other unusual entities, including a "butterfly" crater and a Martian "dog" buried beneath the planet's north pole.

Most of these animal associations are the result of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, which is when the human brain sees or hears something significant in a random image or pattern.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

A massive dark patch lurking within a giant Martian crater has been creeping across the Red Planet's surface since the feature was first spotted 50 years ago, new photos reveal — and scientists are unsure exactly why this is happening.

The shadowy structure is a patch of ground covered with ash and volcanic rocks, such as olivine and pyroxene, from ancient eruptions that occurred millions of years ago, before Mars was considered geologically dead. It is located in Utopia Planitia, a roughly 2,000-mile-wide (3,300 kilometers) plain in Mars' northern hemisphere.

NASA's Viking probes first photographed the blackened ground in 1976, shortly after arriving at the Red Planet. Since then, several photos have shown that this feature is expanding across the surrounding landscape; these include new images from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, which were captured in 2024 and released April 15.

It is unclear how large the shadowy feature is. However, sections of the patch's southern boundary have moved farther south by at least 200 miles (320 km), based on the latest photos from ESA. This suggests the dark terrain has been expanding by around 4 miles (6.5 km) per year.

Scientists are confident that the movement of the dark patch has something to do with Martian winds, which are known to scour the surface and kick up ash and dust.

"The spread of the ash over the last 50 years has two possible explanations: either it has been picked up and moved about by Martian winds, or the ochre dust that previously covered the dark ash has been blown away," ESA representatives wrote in a statement.

However, there is currently no clue as to which hypothesis is correct, they added.

Utopia Planitia

This region of Mars has been of great interest to scientists over the past half century. In 1976, the Viking 2 lander touched down in Utopia Planitia and carried out a series of "biological experiments" until its demise in 1980.

More recently, China's Zhurong rover also touched down there in 2021 and explored the giant plain before going dark in 2023. Chinese scientists have since used the Zhurong data to show that Utopia Planitia was most likely once covered with one of Mars' largest oceans, and they have even mapped out what they think was once a shoreline. The rover also may have detected clues of a surprising "climatic shift" in the region around 400,000 years ago.

Utopia Planitia is home to several large cracks in the ground, known as grabens, which are one of Mars' most unusual features and could also help provide clues to any tectonic activity that once rocked the Red Planet, according to ESA.

In addition, researchers think there is a significant amount of buried ice beneath the region, which could have big implications for the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Saturn may be famous for its rings, but it has long fascinated scientists for another reason: its restless atmosphere, which is shaped by fierce winds, stubborn megastorms and strange weather patterns that can linger for years.

Now, two new views from the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes are cutting through the ringed planet's clouds, giving researchers what NASA calls the "most comprehensive view of Saturn to date." Together, the images let researchers "slice" through Saturn's atmosphere at different heights.

The paired observations capture one of Saturn's strangest landmarks: the famous hexagon at the north pole. According to NASA, the faint edges of the six-sided jet stream appear in both images. These pictures could be some of the last high-resolution views of the hexagon until the 2040s, as Saturn's north pole is about to tip into 15 years of winter darkness.

Studying Saturn's atmosphere not only allows scientists to understand how large, planet-size storms grow and thrive but also gives further insight into how the planet formed and evolved over billions of years.

A planet seen two ways

In August 2024, Hubble took its visible-light image of Saturn as part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, a decade-long project that tracks the outer planets annually. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured its infrared image a few months later, in November 2024. Those observations, taken 14 weeks apart, showed the ringed planet shifting from northern summer toward its 2025 equinox.

The two telescopes saw very different Saturns.

While Hubble captured Saturn's pale-yellow bands and brilliant-white rings, JWST's infrared image revealed even more striking details. In the infrared view, Saturn's rings transformed into glowing blue "because they are made of highly reflective water ice," NASA representatives said in a statement. Saturn's poles also shone a strange gray-green, emitting light at wavelengths of about 4.3 microns. These emissions could be from either light scattering off of high-altitude aerosols or auroras, NASA suggested. (The telescope recently caught giant auroras shining on Uranus.)

As Saturn tilts into its southern springtime, both space telescopes will continue to keep their eyes on its atmosphere, perhaps revealing more about the planet's weather dynamics. Until then, Saturn is keeping some of its most interesting secrets hidden in the clouds.

Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood?

See how well you know the planets in our solar system with our quiz!

Mars is hiding a clutch of ruby-like crystals in its rocks, observations from the Perseverance rover suggest, and astronomers say other precious minerals, like sapphires, could exist across the Red Planet, too.

An international team of researchers presented the findings, based on observations from spring 2025, March 16 at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. These findings are currently under peer review and will appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The story begins a short time ago on a planet not too far away, when a roving robot the size of a compact car climbed the side of a 4 billion-year-old impact crater and began exploring its rim. On that ancient and stony rim, NASA's Perseverance rover found a curious scattering of pale-colored "float rocks" — out-of-place rocks that must have been transported there by impacts, geological activity or hydrological processes.

As scientists often do when faced with a curious specimen, they blasted it with a laser — specifically, the green laser from the Perseverance rover's SuperCam, situated atop its mast. This laser excites minerals, causing them to emit light at specific wavelengths. And because every element and compound emits certain wavelengths of light, this reveals a sample's chemical composition.

The corundum conundrum

The analysis showed that three of the laser-blasted float rocks exhibited clear signatures of the mineral corundum, with inclusions of the element chromium — crystals that match the chemical description of rubies. However, because the crystals are too small to be seen by Perseverance's imager, and their exact chemical composition is uncertain, the researchers aren't sure whether they have truly found Martian rubies or perhaps some other type of corundum.

"The different types of corundum are based on the chemistry," study co-author Valerie Payré, a planetary geologist at the University of Iowa, told Live Science via email. "Although corundum is Al2O3, there are minor elements like chromium, titanium, and iron that can be present."

"These elements will provide the color to the mineral, and the name of it," Payré added. "We cannot quantify the amount of chromium, and other elements like iron and titanium might be present too. It is thus difficult to conclude whether they are rubies or other types of corundum [like sapphires]."

The team ultimately classified the crystals as corundum and declined to guess about the variety without more chemical evidence.

Corundum is a mineral made of aluminum and oxygen. It is one of the hardest known natural substances, approaching the toughness of diamonds. Pure corundum is colorless, but microscopic impurities imbue it with brilliant hues. Iron or titanium inclusions yield brilliant blue sapphires, while chromium produces even rarer, resplendent rubies.

However, anyone holding out hope for a future Martian-gemstone-studded necklace may be disappointed. The corundum crystals found within the float rocks are tiny —‬ less than 0.2 millimeters (0.008 inches) in diameter.

Could slightly larger Martian rubies exist? "Yes, possibly," study co-author Olivier Beyssac, a senior scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Live Science via email. "Anyway corundum is pretty rare on Earth and rarely present as big crystals so one could expect the same on Mars."

Cosmic impacts?

It's also likely that the crystals formed under different conditions than those on our planet. On Earth, corundum is created through metamorphic and igneous processes, in which intense heat and pressure, facilitated by tectonic activity, transform existing rocks into potential gemstones.

But because there is no conclusive evidence for plate tectonics on Mars, the researchers suggest that the ruby-like crystals on the Red Planet may have formed through cosmic impacts.

"The impacts provide high temperatures and high pressures, which can produce corundum. Hydrothermal fluids are also generated," Payré explained. Yet the researchers must find additional samples, at their origin, to describe their formation mechanism.

"As of now, the corundum crystals were found in small pebbles that are coming from elsewhere, i.e., they are out of context. It is therefore difficult to constrain the full story," Payré said.

Rubies are far from the only spectacular stones found at Jezero crater, and further research may reveal sapphire-like stones there as well. In the past, scientists also discovered signs of other potential gemstones elsewhere on Mars, including quartz and opal — suggesting that our red planetary neighbor is a gem laboratory.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Scientists know that Mars spins a little faster each year, but the cause has been a mystery. Now, a new study published Feb. 18 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets suggests the reason may lie deep underground, where a huge plume of buoyant rock could be stirring beneath the Red Planet's crust.

This strange plume could help to explain not just Mars' quicker rotation but also how the planet holds on to geologic heat far longer than expected — forcing scientists to rethink how small, rocky worlds cool and die.

"The Martian surface is so old and shows all these complex but largely not well understood process[es], which I think we can start to unravel by combining interior with surface," Bart Root, an assistant professor of planetary exploration at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and first author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "Understanding Mars will help in understanding our solar system, as its history is laid out on the red soil."

Looking under the surface

Mars has some of the largest volcanoes and mountains in the solar system. This is because, unlike Earth, Mars does not seem to have plate tectonics, the shifting crustal plates that drive much of our planet's volcanic activity. Instead, the lava from Mars' ancient active volcanoes just sits there, piling up and building far bigger structures over time. This resulted in the formation of the Tharsis volcanic province, a volcano-strewn region that stretches 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) across the planet's surface.

In 2018, NASA sent the InSight lander to the Red Planet to better understand the planet's interior, which, in turn, could help reveal more about its volcanoes. For years, the lander studied Mars' interior, giving scientists a direct estimate of the crust's thickness.

Using data from InSight, Root and the team ran computer simulations to test what kinds of structures could explain why the volcanic region has dominated one side of Mars. Those models pointed to a plume of unusually light material — called a "negative mass anomaly," or something less dense than the rock that surrounds it — in the mantle beneath the Tharsis region.

According to the researchers, this anomaly may explain how the Tharsis region became so large and full of volcanoes. It could also signal that fresh volcanic activity on Mars may be possible in the future.

"The negative or light mass anomaly will move upwards and hit the lithosphere of Mars, introducing melt pockets that have the potential to penetrate the crust and erupt as volcanoes," Root said. (The lithosphere is a single rigid outer shell approximately 310 miles (500 km) thick.

A solution to spin?

The researchers then asked whether that same hidden plume of material could also explain Mars' strange spin rate. Earlier measurements comparing data from the Viking landers, which explored Mars in the 1970s, with data from InSight showed that Mars' day is shrinking by roughly 70 microseconds per year. That means the planet is rotating slightly faster over time.

Root and his team used their simulations to calculate whether this less-dense material underneath Tharsis could shift mass inside Mars enough to influence the planet's spin.

"With some simple back-on-the-envelope calculations, we can explain the order of magnitude of the observed speed up," Root said. "Of course more complicated modeling will be needed to actually link this better."

Root compared this process to someone spinning in a desk chair while holding heavy books. If the books are pulled inward, the spin speeds up. Mars may be doing something similar with this less-dense material.

"A negative mass flowing upwards means something heavier needs to go down, and because the mass anomaly is located on the equator of Mars, this means the heavier mass is going closer to [the] rotation axis, hence a speed up," Root said.

Besides being a possible solution to some of Mars' biggest mysteries, these models could help scientists better understand how rocky planets cool and eventually die. Mars is much smaller than Earth, so researchers have long assumed it lost its internal heat relatively quickly. But if the Red Planet still has enough energy to drive deep mantle motion, that suggests smaller worlds may stay active longer than expected.

"I would love to show that Mars is more interesting than was assumed," Root said.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Mar. 25 to make clear there isn't currently an active volcano on Mars, as a previous headline suggested. The new discovery hints that fresh volcanic eruptions may be possible in the future, and that Mars is not volcanically dead after all.

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Astronomers think they've glimpsed one of the rarest sights in space: two planets smashing into each other around a distant star.

The collision appears to have unfolded roughly 11,000 light-years from Earth, around a sunlike star called Gaia20ehk, near the constellation Puppis (the "poop deck"). The researchers say the crash may echo the giant impact thought to have formed Earth and the moon billions of years ago, giving scientists a rare window into how celestial bodies take shape. The findings were published March 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"It's incredible that various telescopes caught this impact in real time," lead study author Anastasios Tzanidakis, a doctoral candidate in astronomy at the University of Washington, said in a statement. "There are only a few other planetary collisions of any kind on record, and none that bear so many similarities to the impact that created the Earth and moon."

A star that suddenly "went completely bonkers"

Planetary collisions are thought to be common in young star systems, but they are hard to catch. The planets must have orbits that take them directly in front of their home star, so that their debris blocks part of the star's light, which telescopes can detect and measure in both visible and infrared light.

Tzanidakis spotted the first clue while combing through telescope data, including observations made by NASA's SPHEREx mission. In 2016, Gaia20ehk looked like an ordinary, stable star. But about five years later, its light dipped suddenly three times and things quickly turned chaotic.

"Right around 2021, it went completely bonkers," Tzanidakis said. "I can't emphasize enough that stars like our sun don't do that. So when we saw this one, we were like 'Hello, what's going on here?'"

Gaia20ehk's particular changes ‪—‬ short drops in brightness and then chaos ‪—‬ had never been observed before, creating a conundrum for the astronomers.

The first clue to what might be happening came from visible-light data, which showed that something was repeatedly passing in front of the star and blocking part of its light. But visible light alone could not show whether the culprit was just floating dust, a stellar outburst or something far more violent, such as a planet being torn apart by the gravity of a supermassive black hole.

To take a closer look, the team analyzed Gaia20ehk's emission in the infrared spectrum. As the star's visible light dipped and grew messy, its infrared signal surged, showing that while the system got dimmer, it was also getting hotter.

That "could mean that the material blocking the star is hot — so hot that it's glowing in the infrared," Tzanidakis said.

That finding suggested to the team that a collision between two planets, while rare to see, was most likely, as two planetary bodies could throw out hot dust and rock into an orbit that would align with their findings.

The researchers think the planets may not have collided in a single instant. The three early dips of Gaia20ehk could mark grazing encounters as the two bodies spiraled closer together.

"At first, they had a series of grazing impacts, which wouldn't produce a lot of infrared energy," Tzanidakis said. "Then, they had their big catastrophic collision, and the infrared really ramped up."

"Andy's unique work leverages decades of data to find things that are happening slowly — astronomy stories that play out over the course of a decade," senior study author James Davenport, an assistant research professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, said in the statement. "Not many researchers are looking for phenomena in this way, which means that all kinds of discoveries are potentially up for grabs."

The team hopes the powerful Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory could be used to discover other planetary collisions that may be difficult to spot. Davenport estimates that, using Rubin, astronomers could discover 100 new impacts over the next decade. Finding other planetary collisions could aid the search for possible habitable worlds that, like Earth, have a moon that helps shield them from asteroids, influences their tides and has other factors that make the world more welcoming.

In addition to being rare, the discovery could provide insight into the type of crash that made our moon. Astronomers said the debris cloud around Gaia20ehk sits at about one astronomical unit from its star — roughly the same distance as Earth orbits the sun — and that is one reason the event resembles the giant impact that struck Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

If that comparison holds, the system could help researchers further test the theory that a planetary collision created our moon.

"How rare is the event that created the Earth and moon? That question is fundamental to astrobiology," Davenport said. "Right now, we don't know how common these dynamics are. But if we catch more of these collisions, we'll start to figure it out."

Moon quiz: What do you know about our nearest celestial neighbor?

Scientists have found a potential shortcut for identifying stars that host planets. The technique, based on specific signals in starlight, could make it easier to search for exoplanets, according to a new study.

The team has already used their new method to turn up half a dozen previously undiscovered planets — but because most of the alien worlds are very close to their stars, they are unlikely to be habitable, the study authors say.

Many of the 6,000-plus known exoplanets are located extremely close to their host stars. This proximity often doesn't turn out well for such close-in worlds, whose surfaces get whipped up by the stars' intense radiation and form comet-like tails of debris. This includes exoplanets like K2-22b, which was analyzed by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2025. The debris typically remains, for millions of years, as a cloud circling the planet's host star.

But this clutter could help astronomers pinpoint stars that host undiscovered exoplanets orbiting close to their stars. That's because the debris, which is mainly a mixture of different gases, absorbs some of its parent star's light at specific visible frequencies.

"That absorption could make the star appear artificially [magnetically] less active," Matthew Standing, a research fellow at the European Space Agency's European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid and the new study's lead author, told Live Science via email. In other words, magnetically inactive stars are potentially good targets in the search for crumbling, close-in exoplanets.

If this hypothesis is confirmed, it could make planet-searching ventures less random.

Signals from the stars

To test the idea, Standing and an international team of collaborators first identified a set of 24 stars with apparently low magnetic activity as part of the Dispersed Matter Planet Project (DMPP), including a handful of stars that the DMPP had analyzed in 2020. The researchers then collected visible-light spectra — the light curves that correspond to wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that humans can see — from these stars, using telescopes at the European Space Observatory in Chile.

They observed each star at least 10 times for up to two weeks. If a star hosted one or more planets, its gravitational "tugs" on its star would cause it to wobble, which would be visible in the spectra. (This method of identifying exoplanets is called the radial-velocity technique.)

Next, the team used a computational algorithm to determine if such changes in the light curves could correspond to as many as four planets for each star system. The analysis also allowed the researchers to determine how sensitive the survey was and how common close-in planets are around stars with low magnetic activity levels.

The results, published Feb. 28 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, showed that 14 stars hosted a total of 24 exoplanets, including a total of seven newly discovered worlds in five of these systems.

The team also calculated that the occurrence of exoplanets around the stars they selected was between eight and 10 times higher than in other radial-velocity surveys. This occurrence rate supports the hypothesis that stars that seem magnetically inactive are likely hosts of close-in, highly irradiated exoplanets.

Additionally, the researchers found that the survey was very comprehensive, identifying nearly 95% of exoplanets that were more than 10 times as massive as Earth and orbited their host stars in five days or less.

The team also extrapolated their results to our cosmic neighborhood, curating a list of roughly 16,000 stars lying within 1,600 light-years from the solar system. (For reference, a light-year is the distance light travels in a year — approximately 5.88 trillion miles, or 9.46 trillion kilometers.) From this list, the researchers found 241 stars with similar signatures of low magnetic activity. Given the proportion of exoplanets in the study, they estimate that these stars may host around 300 planets, just waiting to be discovered.

Standing is cautiously enthusiastic about the technique's potential. "If confirmed with larger samples, this method could help make exoplanet searches more efficient," he said.

The team plans to do just that, expanding the size of their sample and continuing to monitor radial-velocity data for signs of planets, he added.

Organic molecules discovered within a stone on Mars cannot be fully explained by nonbiological processes, and it's "reasonable to hypothesize" that living things could have formed these odd organic molecules, a NASA-led team reports in a new study. However, this doesn't mean scientists have found definitive proof of life on Mars, they cautioned.

In March 2025, scientists reported the discovery of the largest organic molecules ever found on Mars. These long chains made of hydrogen and carbon may be the fragments of fatty acids, which are often created through biological processes.

In a paper published Feb. 4 in the journal Astrobiology, researchers analyzed numerous ways those organic molecules could have formed. Using mathematical modeling, information from the Curiosity rover, and data from recent radiolysis experiments, which assess how molecules are destroyed by radiation, the researchers rewound the clock by billions of years to extrapolate how abundant the molecules may have been when they were first deposited.

A discovery more than a decade in the making

The organic molecules in question are called alkanes. They are hydrocarbons, long chains of 10 to 12 carbon atoms with multiple hydrogen atoms attached to each carbon. If the ending of their names sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the alkane chemical family includes ethane, methane, propane and butane — though these are much shorter chains. Alkane chains of 12 carbons or more are more likely to be made by biological processes.

These tantalizingly large molecules are embedded within the Cumberland mudstone, a fine-grained sedimentary rock in an ancient Martian lake bed named Yellowknife Bay. Curiosity initially drilled into this stone back in 2013 and has since performed various analyses using its onboard chemistry lab, the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument.

However, researchers discovered the organic molecules only around a year ago, after preheating the sample to 2,012 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius) in a search for amino acids. Instead of the building blocks of proteins, however, they found the traces of the largest organic molecules ever discovered on Mars.

Rewinding the clock on a Martian mudstone

In the recent study, researchers wound back the clock on this sample, extrapolating how abundant these molecules would have been billions of years ago when they were deposited in the mudstone.

The alkanes in the sample have a measured abundance of 30 to 50 parts per billion (ppb), but the Cumberland mudstone has been exposed to the harsh effects of radiation on Mars' surface for about 80 million years. As a result, its organics have been degraded by the eons-long bombardment of energetic particles from the sun and from the universe at large.

"Given the geologic history and thermal maturation of the organics preserved in the Cumberland sample, it is reasonable to presume that the recovered material is only a fraction (possibly several orders of magnitude less) of the primary lipid content that would have been entrained in the sedimentary unit when it was deposited two and a half billion years ago," the researchers explained in the paper.

Using previous radiolysis experiments as a gauge, the researchers calculated a "conservative" initial abundance of 120 to 7,700 ppb for the alkanes, or the fatty acids from which they fragmented. So, could abiotic sources account for substantial quantities of these substances, or did they form through biological processes?

The researchers assessed numerous scenarios. First, they explored a space-based origin. Interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) and meteorites frequently deliver organic molecules to the Martian surface. But the researchers concluded that it is unlikely that these processes account for the organic abundance in the Cumberland sample because IDPs cannot penetrate rock and there are no signs of meteorite impacts.

In the second scenario, organic molecules settle on the surface after separating from the atmosphere, but Mars' ancient atmospheric haze wasn't foggy enough to explain the observed abundance.

Water-rock interactions could have contributed, but they generally produce smaller organic molecules. Fatty acid molecules can occur via a different pathway; but it requires high temperatures, and Cumberland shows no signs of having been appropriately heated.

Proof of alien life?

Despite these ruled-out theories, one non-biological process did hold water: the researchers cannot rule out that some of the organics formed abiotically in Mars' hydrothermal systems and were transported to the surface by watery, organic-rich fluids.

"To be clear, we do not claim that proof of ancient martian life was found in the Cumberland mudstone," the researchers said in the paper.

Still, the Cumberland sample is rich in many biologically implicated molecular goodies. These include clay minerals that form in the presence of water, nutritious nitrates, a type of carbon linked with biological processes, and the sulfur that helps preserve organic molecules.

Gale Crater, the site of Yellowknife Bay, also held water for untold millions of years, ostensibly giving life-forming chemistry plenty of time to mix and match a multitude of molecules.

Yet the Curiosity rover may be limited in its ability to analyze even larger molecules — which are more likely to be associated with biological processes — because of the way it must separate and identify them. Analyses like these, even on Earth, "always have tradeoffs," study co-author Christopher House, geosciences professor at Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, told Live Science via email. "So, Curiosity might be able to find larger organic molecules, but not with the [precision] that made the identification of these specific molecules convincing."

The next step is to perform experimental studies on Earth that mimic the Cumberland mudstone and the Martian environment, in order to ascertain how organic molecules like fatty acids react to Martian conditions. (The ultimate goal is for scientists to get their hands on some real Martian mudstone via a Mars sample-return mission, though that is currently a murky proposition at best.)

The existence of past or present Martian life is also hazy, but there's reason for optimism among ET aficionados. The "researchers say that as the non-biological sources they considered could not fully explain the abundance of organic compounds, it is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that living things could have formed them," NASA officials said in a statement.

Coincidentally, the microbial processes that could have produced these organics may have emerged on Earth around the same time, during the Archean eon. Considering that the Perseverance rover also discovered potential biosignatures in 2025, the answer to the ultimate question is more beguiling than ever.

NASA's Curiosity rover has snapped stunning new photos of giant "spiderwebs" zig-zagging across the surface of Mars. One of these images has revealed never-before-seen, egg-like spheroids covering the sprawling structures — and scientists are struggling to explain them.

Over the last 8 months, Curiosity has been closely examining a series of interconnected rocky ridges, dubbed "boxwork," on the slopes of Mount Sharp, in the Gale Crater. These ridges, which cover an area up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, were created billions of yars ago as ancient Martian groundwater seeped beneath the planet's surface. They were first spotted by orbital spacecraft in 2006, but they have remained largely unexplored until now.

The web-like structures should not be confused with the infamous "spiders on Mars" — a series of geological features that are created when carbon dioxide ice sublimates beneath the Red Planet's surface and look like swarming arachnids when viewed from above. (These faux spiders were also recently recreated on Earth, while a similar "wall demon" was also spotted on Jupiter's moon Europa.)

NASA released Curiosity's first boxwork photos in June 2025, shortly after reaching the rocky ridges. But on Monday (Feb. 23), the agency released two more snaps, which showed the structures in much greater detail.

One of these photos, captured Sept. 26 last year, shows off a ground-level view of the ridges, which stand 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) above Mars' surface. But a second close-up image, snapped on Aug. 21, revealed that some of these ridges are covered in tiny irregular-shaped lumps, or nodules, that have not been seen until now.

These nodules bear a striking resemblance to mini spheroids on the surface of a mysterious "spider egg" rock, which was discovered in the Jezero Crater by NASA's Perseverance rover last year and has an unknown origin. And researchers are also having a hard time explaining exactly how the tiny boxwork "eggs" formed.

"We can't quite explain yet why the nodules appear where they do," Tina Seeger, a planetary scientist at Rice University in Houston who is leading Curiosity's boxwork investigations, said in a statement. "Maybe the ridges were cemented by minerals first, and later episodes of groundwater left nodules around them," Seeger said. But more work is needed to confirm if this is the case.

However, while the nodules and boxwork have an eerily biological appearance, there is no suggestion that they have any direct ties to extraterrestrial life.

Martian spiderwebs

Boxwork is made up of criss-crossing ridges of mineral-rich rocks that litter the surface of Mars. Similar yet smaller structures are found on Earth, predominantly within caves, and form when calcite-rich water flows between rocks that are eventually eroded, much like how stalagmites and stalactites form, according to the National Speleological Society.

However, on Mars, the boxwork was shaped by the fierce winds that scour the planet's surface: "The bedrock below these ridges likely formed when groundwater trickling through the rock left behind minerals that accumulated in those cracks and fissures, hardening and becoming cementlike," NASA representatives previously wrote. "Eons of sandblasting by Martian wind wore away the rock but not the minerals, revealing networks of resistant ridges within."

The team is particularly interested in the patch of boxwork on Mount Sharp because it formed in isolation and is surprisingly high up the mountain's slopes, which has implications for the planet's puzzling watery past.

"Seeing boxwork this far up the mountain suggests the groundwater table had to be pretty high," Seeger said. This hints that the water in this area may have "lasted much longer than we thought," she added.

Researchers hope that further investigation will also shed light on the specific conditions that formed these structures and whether they might have been favorable to any potential ancient Martian microbes.

"These ridges will include minerals that crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer, with salty liquid water flowing through," Kirsten Siebach, a Curiosity mission scientist at Rice University who has also studied the area, previously said. "Early Earth microbes could have survived in a similar environment. That makes this an exciting place to explore."

Uneven terrain

While the latest stage of Curiosity's mission is yielding fascinating results, it is also proving to be one of the hardest to navigate.

The boxwork is arguably the hardest terrain that the car-sized robot has had to traverse since it landed in the Gale Crater in 2012. The rover must balance along the ridges "like a highway" and avoid slipping "down into the hollows" between them, Ashley Stroupe, a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in the statement.

The task of controlling the rover has also become increasingly challenging due to a gaping hole in one of the robot's wheels, which was first spotted in late 2024.

"There’s always a solution," Stroupe said. "It just takes trying different paths."

Mars quiz: Is your knowledge of the Red Planet out of this world?

Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope just mapped the mysterious upper atmosphere of Uranus for the first time, revealing strange new features of the planet's mysterious magnetic field and glowing auroras.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observed Uranus rotating for 15 hours (nearly a full Uranian day) to learn more about how ice giants distribute energy in the upper layers of their atmospheres and to investigate how the planet's auroras operate.

Uranus' magnetic field is unique among the big planets of our solar system in that its magnetic pole is tilted by 60 degrees relative to its geographic pole. That tilt produces auroras that extend far beyond the poles of Uranus, unlike auroras on Earth.

To learn more, scientists used JWST to study Uranus' magnetosphere — the region of space around Uranus that's dominated by the planet's magnetic field.

"Uranus's magnetosphere is one of the strangest in the solar system," study lead author Paola Tiranti, a doctoral student at Northumbria University in the U.K., said in a European Space Agency (ESA) statement. "Webb has now shown us how deeply those effects reach into the atmosphere."

Strange lights on Uranus

JWST charted "the most detailed portrait yet" of how particles in Uranus' upper atmosphere are energized (ionized) by interactions with the sun, ESA officials said in the statement. The study, published Feb. 19 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, aimed to measure ion temperature and density as far as 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops of Uranus.

Temperature and density do not peak at the same altitude, JWST showed. Ions were the warmest between roughly 2,500 and 3,100 miles (4,000 and 5,000 km) but the densest at about 600 miles (1,000 km). This is because of the "complex geometry" of the planet's magnetic field, ESA officials said in the statement.

That geometry also produced two bright bands of auroras near Uranus' magnetic poles. In between the aurora belts, however, there is a "depletion" in both ion density and auroral emissions — an effect likely produced by transitions between the planet's magnetic-field lines, the scientists said. Observations at Jupiter's upper atmosphere have shown similar transition regions.

In addition to charting Uranus' upper atmosphere in three dimensions for the first time, JWST confirmed findings from previous studies that suggested the planet's upper atmosphere has been cooling steadily since the early 1990s. The telescope showed the average temperature of Uranus' atmosphere is about 307 degrees Fahrenheit (153 degrees Celsius), which is lower than the temperature measurements from other spacecraft and ground-based telescopes.

"By revealing Uranus's vertical structure in such detail, Webb is helping us understand the energy balance of the ice giants," Tiranti said. "This is a crucial step towards characterizing giant planets beyond our solar system."

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

A planetary parade is about to bring six of Earth's neighbors into the night sky at once — but it won't be easy to see.

If you can find an unobstructed view due west and clear skies on Saturday, Feb. 28, you may see the two inner planets, Venus and Mercury, close to Saturn, with Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter also in the night sky, according to NASA.

The window will be tight, with Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Neptune appearing only briefly after sunset. Venus, Mercury and Saturn should all be visible to the naked eye, though a pair of stargazing binoculars may be helpful. Venus and Mercury will be closest to the horizon during twilight, with Saturn above.

Neptune will be right next to Saturn, but a 6-inch (15 centimeters) skywatching telescope will be required to get a good view of Neptune (and, in twilight, even that's unlikely). These four planets will be in the sky about half an hour after sunset and remain so for around 45 minutes.

Once you've observed Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Neptune, look high in the south for Jupiter in the constellation Gemini. It will shine very brightly, so it should be easy to find. The three stars of Orion's Belt will be roughly halfway between the other four planets and Jupiter. The giant planet will also appear as a steady, whitish light that doesn't twinkle as stars do.

Uranus, the Pleiades and a total lunar eclipse

The seventh planet, Uranus, will also be in the night sky, but it will be best seen with binoculars or a small telescope. To find it, use Orion's Belt again, following its three stars — Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka — upward, until you get to the shimmering sight of the Pleiades open cluster (also called "The Seven Sisters" or M45). Uranus will be just below the Pleiades, in the constellation Taurus.

As a bonus, on Feb. 28, the moon will also be in the night sky alongside another famous star cluster. About 92%-illuminated, the waxing gibbous moon will move close to the Beehive Cluster (also called M44 and NGC 2632), a bright cluster of around 1,000 stars that's about 577 light-years from the solar system.

As the planetary parade fades, something arguably more spectacular takes its place: a total lunar eclipse on March 3 as the full "Worm Moon" passes through Earth's dark shadow. During this event, also dubbed a "blood moon," the lunar surface will turn a reddish-copper color for 58 minutes, with the best views of the entire eclipse sequence from the western U.S. (including Alaska and Hawaii), the Pacific islands, New Zealand, Australia and East Asia.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, may be made of two different moons that smashed together hundreds of millions of years ago, a new study suggests. If confirmed, this epic collision could also help to solve several long-standing mysteries surrounding the gas giant, including how its iconic rings formed.

Titan is the solar system's second-largest moon, behind Jupiter's Ganymede. It is around 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) across, which is roughly 1.5 times wider than Earth's moon and around 5% wider than Mercury.

Aside from its immense size, Titan is notable for its dense atmosphere, which consists mainly of nitrogen and is around 1.5 times thicker than Earth's atmosphere. It is also the only solar system body, other than Earth, that has confirmed liquid on its surface, in the form of methane — making it a potential candidate for hosting extraterrestrial life. The European Space Agency's Huygens probe touched down on Titan in 2005, making it the only moon, other than our own, that a spacecraft has landed on.

Until now, researchers thought that, like most other moons, Titan formed billions of years ago via the gradual accumulation of tiny chunks of rock and dust. But in the new study, uploaded Feb. 9 to the preprint server arXiv and accepted for future publication in The Planetary Science Journal, researchers from the SETI Institute showed that this may not be the case.

Based on data collected by NASA's Cassini probe, which flew past Titan and deployed Huygens to its surface, the SETI team proposes that Titan may have formed around 400 million years ago when two similarly massive moons slammed into each other.

This collision also may have birthed another Saturnian moon, Hyperion, the researchers argue. This smaller satellite, which is around 84 miles (135 km) wide, likely formed from the debris from the collision, much like Earth's moon did when the protoplanet Theia smashed into Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

Additionally, the new hypothesis may explain the unusual orbits of several other Saturnian satellites, the team said.

Saturn's missing moon

Saturn has at least 274 moons — the most of any planet — after the recent discovery of 128 natural satellites. However, researchers have long suspected that another massive moon is missing.

Saturn's orbit around the sun is heavily tilted relative to the rest of the planets (excluding its wonky neighbor Uranus), which not only allows us to see the planet's extraordinary rings but also hints that something massive once pulled it out of place. This mystery object was most likely a large moon, which researchers have long suspected was gravitationally slingshotted away from Saturn.

In the new study, researchers explored the possibility that this moon didn't disappear but was instead destroyed.

The "most important clue" that this other moon was destroyed is Hyperion, which is locked in an orbital resonance with Titan, circling Saturn three times for every four of Titan's orbits.

"We recognized that the Titan-Hyperion lock is relatively young, only a few hundred million years old," study lead author and SETI researcher Matija Ćuk said in a statement. "This dates to about the same period when the extra moon disappeared. [So] perhaps Hyperion did not survive this upheaval but resulted from it."

After simulating multiple scenarios from the Cassini data, the team now thinks two massive moons, dubbed "Proto-Titan" and "Proto-Hyperion," smashed into each other, thereby birthing Titan and eventually creating Hyperion from the remnants of the massive collision.

Rings, orbits and automobiles

Hyperion may not have been the only moon created or affected by this potential crash.

The researchers propose that the impact could have birthed several other moons that slowly drifted toward Saturn and collided with other existing satellites, creating a field of debris that eventually settled into Saturn's rings around 100 million years ago. (This hypothesis contradicts a recent study that suggested Saturn's rings are much older than previously realized.)

The study team also theorizes that the collision could explain the wonky orbits of two other Saturnian moons, Iapetus and Rhea, which are significantly tilted compared with their surrounding satellites and somewhat resonate with Titan's orbit.

In addition, their hypothesis could explain Titan's surprising lack of impact craters: Because it is much younger than previously realized, it has been exposed to fewer meteor strikes. The team proposes that, prior to its creation, Proto-Titan may have been covered in pockmarks, similar to Jupiter's moon Callisto.

NASA is preparing to send its Dragonfly probe to visit and explore Titan. The drone-like spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2028, which would allow it to reach the moon by 2034. When it arrives, it could potentially confirm the collision hypothesis and unravel more of the moon's remaining mysteries.

Planets go through different life stages: They form, evolve and eventually meet an end. But the timelines for these processes differ widely between Earth-like planets and worlds that orbit less-powerful stars.

So, how long do most planets last?

First, it's important to understand the life cycles of planets.

"Planets start off as microscopic dust grains in disks orbiting young stars, and eventually grow by a huge amount through a series of collisions," Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at the University of Bordeaux in France, told Live Science in an email.

Gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn, start off as massive rocky and icy cores, and then capture gas from the disk to become giants. Rocky planets like Earth undergo a late phase of giant collisions with other growing planets and smaller objects after the gas disk from the sun had dissipated, Raymond said. However, there is still some debate among scientists about the order in which planets formed.

Defining the "end" of a planet, however, is more complicated. "You could say a planet lasts until it's destroyed," Matthew Reinhold, a planetary scientist at Stanford University, told Live Science. Or, you could define a planet's ending to be when it no longer operates under the same conditions. "You could say, 'This was a world that had these conditions at some point, but now it has changed and has these very different conditions," Reinhold said. "Because I prefer those previous conditions; I consider this planet as having ended.'"

Let's take Earth as an example. Like many others, our planet's lifespan is tied to the evolution of the sun. The sun currently creates heat and light through nuclear fusion at its core — a process in which hydrogen transforms into helium. In about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen, at which point it will expand into a red giant and eventually collapse into itself.

"Our Earth will 'die' in multiple ways," Raymond said. "First, the slowly-brightening Sun will make conditions on the Earth unlivable by vaporizing the oceans. Then, Earth may be swallowed by the Sun when it becomes a red giant. Finally, Earth (if it's still around) will be tossed into interstellar space."

According to these calculations, Earth's total lifespan will be about 9.5 billion years.

Earth probably won't live as long as most planets, he noted. That's because, unlike the sun, which is a yellow dwarf star, most stars are red dwarfs that are smaller and cooler than our sun, and they burn fuel much more slowly. "They can last for trillions of years," Reinhold said.

In that case, it might not be the death of the star, but rather an internal process that leads to these planets' demise.

In his work, Reinhold has modeled what might happen to a hypothetical habitable planet orbiting a red dwarf star. Active geology, such as plate tectonics, is considered crucial for habitability because it allows nutrients to move between the planet's mantle and surface and drives the carbon-silicate cycle.

"We want a planet that can stabilize its climate," Reinhold said, and the carbon-silicate cycle is Earth's natural thermostat.

Reinhold found that mantle convection will last somewhere between 30 billion and 90 billion years, while mantle melting might last somewhere between 16 billion and 23 billion years. Although these number ranges are too large to be meaningful, Reinhold said, they suggest that any Earth-like planets orbiting a red dwarf will die of an internal process long before their stars get close to the ends of their lives. And even on the shortest timelines, most rocky planets orbiting red dwarfs will maintain their conditions for billions of years.

Bigger stars have much shorter lifespans, because they use up their nuclear fuel more quickly. So the fate of an inner planet orbiting an A-type white star, for instance, would be tied up to the star's lifespan of 100 million to 1 billion years.

It's also possible for gas giants to lose their atmospheres due to the intense light from their star, Reinhold said, becoming rocky planets. This process depends on how close a planet is to its star, how much energetic radiation the star emits, and how strong a planet's gravity is. "The stronger their gravity, the better they are at holding onto their atmospheres, and the more radiation they get from their star, the more intense the stripping power," Reinhold explained. Depending on those factors, this can take anywhere from millions to billions of years.

The end of the universe

Even when a planet's conditions change over time, the rock itself still exists. But over large timescales, there are different possibilities for its fate as the probability of rare events increases. It may collide with another planet, or be kicked out of its orbit.

"In all of this mayhem over quadrillions of years, the planets that have been kicked away from their stars will be kicked out of the galaxy to wander for eternity in the void," Reinhold said. "What actually seals [its] fate really comes down to the nature of the end of the universe," said Reinhold.

Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood?

Astronomers have spotted an unusual planetary system with a rebellious rocky planet orbiting well beyond where it would be expected to form.

Typically, rocky planets develop closer to a star, and gaseous planets form farther out — as is the case in our solar system, with a vast asteroid belt drawing the line between rocky Mars and gassy Jupiter.

And in the newly spotted system of four planets, the first three follow this pattern. But the system also has a rocky planet orbiting at its outer edge, beyond the two gas planets. That suggests the planet formed after the gas in the protoplanetary disk was already used up, researchers reported Feb. 12 in the journal Science.

"This strange disorder makes it a unique inside-out system," study co-author Thomas Wilson, an exoplanet scientist at the University of Warwick in the U.K., said in a statement. "Rocky planets don't usually form far away from their home star, on the outside of the gaseous worlds."

A rebel world

As the planets in our solar system formed and grew, they accreted dust, metals and other solids. Far from the sun, materials such as water and methane remained solid due to the cooler temperatures. As the outer planets got larger, they pulled in hydrogen and helium from their surroundings and grew into gas giants.

"Historically, our planet formation theories are based on what we see and know about our Solar System," study co-author Isabel Rebollido, a researcher who studies exoplanet systems at the European Space Agency (ESA), said in the statement. "As we are seeing more and more different exoplanet systems, we are starting to revisit these theories."

In the new study, Wilson and colleagues searched for exoplanets surrounding the red dwarf star LHS 1903, which had been observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite between 2019 and 2023. When a planet passes between the star and the satellite, it dims the star's light slightly. Then, they studied the properties of those planets, using the Characterizing Exoplanets Satellite (CHEOPS).

The scientists spotted four exoplanets orbiting the star, including the distant rocky one. The planets likely did not form at the same time, the team found; instead, they developed one by one and changed the environment in which each subsequent planet grew.

"By the time this final outer planet formed, the system may have already run out of gas, which is considered vital for planet formation," Wilson said in the statement. "Yet here is a small, rocky world, defying expectations. It seems that we have found [the] first evidence for a planet that formed in a gas-depleted environment."

The team further ruled out ideas that the distant rocky planet had lost its atmosphere in a collision or swapped places with a gas planet.

"Much about how planets form and evolve is still a mystery," study co-author Maximilian Günther, an astrophysicist at ESA, said in the statement. "Finding clues like this one for solving this puzzle is precisely what CHEOPS set out to do."

Scientists may have solved a long-standing mystery surrounding Uranus' extraordinarily strong radiation belt.

A new analysis of Voyager 2 data suggests that a temporary space weather event may have made the planet's electron radiation belt more intense than usual as Voyager 2 was passing by. The findings could help to explain why the radiation belt was so much stronger than scientists had predicted it would be.

Radiation belts are formed from interactions between the solar wind and a planet's magnetic field. The sun emits a continuous stream of protons and electrons from its outer atmosphere, called the corona. For planets that have a global magnetic field, including Earth and Uranus, some of those energetic, charged particles get trapped in the magnetosphere.

In January 1986, Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and measured the strength of its radiation belts. While the ion radiation belt was a little weaker than expected, the electron radiation belt was much more intense than scientists had predicted — close to the maximum intensity Uranus could sustain. Since then, scientists have tried to figure out how and why this was the case.

"Science has come a long way since the Voyager 2 flyby," Robert Allen, a space physicist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and coauthor of the new research, said in a statement. "We decided to take a comparative approach looking at the Voyager 2 data and compare it to Earth observations we've made in the decades since."

Earth versus Uranus

In the study, published in November 2025 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Allen and colleagues revisited data collected by Voyager 2 during its flyby of Uranus. They found several similarities between the Voyager data and the data collected from Earth orbit during a space weather event in 2019.

Uranus' unusually intense radiation belt may have been caused by a "co-rotating interaction region," the team found. A co-rotating interaction region occurs when high-speed solar winds overtake slower solar wind streams. The phenomenon could have accelerated electrons and added energy to the radiation belt, the researchers said.

"In 2019, Earth experienced one of these events, which caused an immense amount of radiation belt electron acceleration," said study co-author Sarah Vines, a space physicist at SwRI. "If a similar mechanism interacted with the Uranian system, it would explain why Voyager 2 saw all this unexpected additional energy."

If that's the case, it raises many more questions about the physics of Uranus' magnetosphere and its interactions with the solar wind, including the radiation belt's stability during the extreme seasons caused by the planet's tilted axis of rotation. A spacecraft orbiting Uranus and collecting data from different parts of the magnetosphere could help address those questions, the researchers wrote in the study.

"This is just one more reason to send a mission targeting Uranus," Allen said in the statement. "The findings have some important implications for similar systems, such as Neptune's."

Many tiny specks of ancient water are locked within one of the oldest and most famous Martian meteorites ever to fall to Earth, a new study finds. The surprising discovery, achieved using a new form of "neutron scanning," reveals more clues about the Red Planet's watery past, which may have set the stage for extraterrestrial life to flourish.

Meteorite NWA 7034, more commonly known as Black Beauty, is a roughly 11-ounce (320 grams) chunk of Mars that was ejected when another space rock slammed into the Red Planet. It was discovered in 2011 by nomads in the Moroccan region of the Sahara Desert, although it is unclear when it fell to Earth. The meteorite has since become famous for its dark hue, which has been further accentuated by heavy polishing on one of its faces.

Black Beauty likely originates from the 6-mile-wide (10 kilometers) Karratha crater near Mars' equator, and was ejected into space between 5 million and 10 million years ago, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. However, it is much older than that, and scientists have since dated the coal-like rock to at least 4.44 billion years ago, making it the oldest Martian meteorite found to date.

Researchers have known since 2013 that Black Beauty contained traces of water. More recent analyses of the meteorite have revealed evidence that this water may have been partially heated, raising hopes that Martian microbes may have once thrived in warm waters on the Red Planet.

Until now, however, researchers have had to break off and destroy tiny chunks of the meteorite to properly study the water trapped within it, which has limited what they can learn from it, according to Universe Today.

But in the new study, uploaded Jan. 13 to the preprint server arXiv, researchers report that a new scanning method has allowed them to create the first in-depth analysis of the meteorite's entire water content.

This examination revealed that water likely accounts for around 0.6% of Black Beauty's mass, which equates to a piece of the rock around the size of a human fingernail, according to Universe Today. This may not sound like much, but it is much more than previous estimates had suggested.

Most of this water is locked within tiny fragments, or clasts, of hydrogen-rich iron oxyhydroxide (FeHO₂), which is similar to the main component of rust and forms when iron reacts with water under high pressure, like during a meteor impact.

In the new study, researchers used a version of CT scanning, which builds an internal image of soft objects, like the human body, using X-rays. But instead of using electromagnetic radiation, the team bombarded the meteorite with neutrons, which proved to be particularly good at identifying hydrogen atoms embedded within the extremely dense sample.

You can see this process in action for yourself in a YouTube video shared by one of the researchers.

Water on Mars

It is hard to imagine that the dusty red ball Mars is today was once a water world. However, a mounting body of evidence suggests the planet was once home to large, Earth-like oceans until around 3 billion years ago.

Most of this water has since disappeared, although some of it remains in the form of ice slabs buried near the planet's equator, frosty deposits at the summit of Martian mountains, and a massive subsurface reservoir discovered in 2024.

Black Beauty is widely considered the oldest direct evidence of water on Mars, so it could help reveal how Mars first acquired its once-abundant water. As a result, researchers are keen to further analyze its insides.

Given that NASA recently pulled the plug on its Mars sample-return mission, which would have delivered samples collected by the Perseverance rover back to Earth, meteorites like Black Beauty are the only way to directly study Martian water.

Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa appears to have life-friendly molecules on its surface.

Al Emran, a researcher with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, spotted ammonia on the surface of Europa while looking through old data from the Galileo mission, which studied Jupiter and its moons from 1995 to 2003.

Data gathered from Galileo's near-infrared mapping spectrometer in 1997 showed "faint signals of ammonia" near cracks on the frozen moon's surface, NASA officials wrote in a statement describing the findings, which were published late last year in The Planetary Science Journal.

It is the "first such detection at Europa" and therefore has important implications for the habitability of the icy moon, which is considered one of the most likely places in the solar system to host extraterrestrial life, according to the statement.

Alien ice moon

Ammonia is a nitrogen-bearing molecule and one of the ingredients of life as we know it, alongside carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and water. In the new paper, Emran said the finding was therefore of "astrobiological significance, given nitrogen's essential role in the chemistry of life."

The Galileo spacecraft worked in the Jupiter system between 1995 and 2003, before it ran low on fuel. Engineers deliberately steered the spacecraft into the giant planet to avoid any risk of contaminating Europa or other icy moons. Although the mission concluded operations more than 20 years ago, scientists sometimes find new insights in older datasets, either by using newer tools or knowledge, or by examining information that was not previously scrutinized.

In the new research, NASA spotted traces of ammonia near fractures on the icy surface of Europa. It is believed that these fractures included liquid water with ammonia compounds; the ammonia lowers the freezing point of water, sort of like antifreeze, the agency said.

The ammonia may have come "from either the moon's subsurface ocean, or its shallow subsurface," NASA officials said in the statement. That's because ammonia doesn't last long in space because it gets broken down by ultraviolet light and cosmic radiation. Cryovolcanism, or icy volcanism, likely pushed the ammonia compounds to the surface, they explained.

A follow-up mission may reveal more insight: Europa Clipper, which launched in October 2024, is expected to arrive at the Jupiter system in April 2030. The mission will specifically look for chemical signs of habitability on the icy moon.

Jupiter is slightly smaller and flatter than scientists thought for decades, a new study finds.

Researchers used radio data from the Juno spacecraft to refine measurements of the solar system's largest planet. Although the differences between the current and previous measurements are small, they are improving models of Jupiter's interior and of other gas giants like it outside the solar system, the team reported Feb. 2 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"Textbooks will need to be updated," study co-author Yohai Kaspi, a planetary scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said in a statement. "The size of Jupiter hasn't changed, of course, but the way we measure it has."

Until now, scientists' understanding of Jupiter's size and shape have been based on six measurements performed by the Voyager 1 and 2 and Pioneer 10 and 11 missions. Those measurements, which have since been adopted as standard, were performed around 50 years ago using radio beams, according to the statement.

But the Juno mission, which has been gathering data on Jupiter and its moons since it arrived at the gas giant in 2016, has collected much more of this radio data in the past two years. With that additional data, researchers have now refined measurements of Jupiter's size down to about 1,300 feet (400 meters) in each direction.

"Just by knowing the distance to Jupiter and watching how it rotates, it's possible to figure out its size and shape," Kaspi said. "But making really accurate measurements calls for more sophisticated methods."

Bending light

In the new study, the scientists tracked how the radio signals from Juno back to Earth bent as they passed through Jupiter's atmosphere, before cutting out when the planet blocked the signal entirely. Those measurements allowed the team to account for Jupiter's winds, which slightly alter the shape of the gaseous planet. Then, they used that information to make precise calculations of the planet's shape and size.

With the new data, the team calculated that the planet's radius from its pole to its center is 41,534 miles (66,842 km) — 7.5 miles (12 km) smaller than previous measurements. The newly calculated radius at the equator is 44,421 miles (71,488 km) — 2.5 miles (4 km) smaller than previously thought.

"These few kilometers matter," study co-author Eli Galanti, an expert on gas giants at the Weizmann Institute of Science, said in the statement. "Shifting the radius by just a little lets our models of Jupiter's interior fit both the gravity data and atmospheric measurements much better."

The updated measurements will improve our understanding of Jupiter's interior, as well as help scientists interpret data from gas giants beyond the solar system, the researchers wrote in the study.

"This research helps us understand how planets form and evolve," Kaspi said in the statement. "Jupiter was likely the first planet to form in the solar system, and by studying what's happening inside it, we get closer to understanding how the solar system, and planets like ours, came to be."

A giant cloud of vaporized metal may be hiding a secret planet or second alien sun in a nearby star system, a new study reveals.

The mysterious cloud is up to 15,000 times wider than our planet, and made its home star almost completely disappear from telescope observations for nearly nine months when the ghostly object oozed between its host star and Earth.

Astronomers were first alerted to the mysterious cloud's presence in September 2024, when they detected a surprise dimming event surrounding the star J0705+0612 (sometimes referred to as ASASSN-24fw) — a sun-like, main sequence star around 3,000 light years from Earth. The star's brightness suddenly fell 40-fold, to around 3% of its original luminosity, and remained that way for just over eight and a half months before returning to full brightness in May 2025.

"Stars like the sun don't just stop shining for no reason," study lead author Nadia Zakamska, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. "So dramatic dimming events like this are very rare."

In the study, published Jan. 21 in The Astronomical Journal, Zakamska and her team analyzed this strange event using data captured by the Gemini South telescope and the Magellan Telescopes in Chile, and found that a massive object had passed in front of, or occulted, J0705+0612. After ruling out things like giant planets and asteroid belts, which were either too small or too diffuse to block out so much light for so long, the researchers concluded that the occulting object was a thick cloud of molecular gas.

The unnamed cloud is approximately 125 million miles (200 million kilometers) across and is positioned around 13.3 astronomical units (or roughly 13.3 Earth-sun distances) from J0705+0612. For context, that would put it around halfway between Saturn and Uranus if it were located in our solar system. At this distance, it takes about 44 years for the cloud to fully orbit its home star.

Gemini South's newly operational Gemini High-resolution Optical Spectrograph (GHOST) instrument, which captures specific wavelengths of light given off by different molecules, played a key role in the study. It peered deeper into the cloud than other telescopes can, enabling the researchers to probe exactly what the cloud was made of.

The results "exceeded all expectations," revealing an abundance of metals, such as iron and calcium, Zakamska said. The GHOST data also enabled the team to track subtle movements within the cloud, which is "something we've never been able to do before in a system like this," she added.

After reviewing the cloud's movements, it quickly became clear that the metallic mass was being held together by a hefty object at its center. Based on the size of the cloud, this could either be a gas giant several times larger than Jupiter, a low-mass star in a binary pair with J0705+0612, or a brown dwarf — a sort of planet-star hybrid that's more massive than Jupiter but not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion in its core.

If the cloud surrounds a star, then it would be classified as a circumsecondary disk because its host star is the secondary, or smaller, star in its binary pair. But if it is being held together by a planet, then it would be dubbed a circumplanetary disk. The researchers suggest the cloud is more likely held together by a star, due to high levels of infrared radiation glowing from the cloud. However, it is too early to tell for sure.

The next mystery is how the cloud formed. The researchers predict that the cloud is around 2 billion years old, hinting that it is younger than J0705+0612, which is likely closer in age to the sun (around 4.6 billion years old). This would mean that it is not left over from the star system's creation, like most other similar disks.

Instead, the researchers predict that it was birthed by a planetary collision, similar to the one that birthed the moon. This would not only explain the cloud's age but also its surprisingly high metal content, the researchers argue.

"This event shows us that even in mature planetary systems, dramatic, large-scale collisions can still occur," Zakamska said. "It's a vivid reminder that the universe is far from static — it's an ongoing story of creation, destruction, and transformation."

Researchers will likely learn more about this mysterious cloud in 2068, when it will next pass between J0705+0612 and Earth.

New evidence of ancient rivers suggests Mars may have been a "blue planet," thanks to an ocean spanning its entire northern hemisphere.

Cameras from several Mars orbiters captured the dusty remnants of apparent river deltas, which were described in research published Jan. 7 in the journal NPJ Space Exploration.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Bern, peered at the famed Valles Marineris, which is the largest valley system on Mars and five times longer than the Grand Canyon. Around this Red Planet region, scientists spotted "structures near the canyon system that resemble river deltas on Earth," University of Bern representatives wrote in a statement.

"These structures represent the mouth of a river into an ocean," the statement added. "The new study thus provides clear evidence of a coastline, and consequently, of an earlier ocean on Mars."

Water, water everywhere

Although Mars is dry and dusty today, there are many signs that the planet hosted water in the ancient past. For example, Mars rovers have spotted "blueberry stones" that may include iron oxide minerals containing water. NASA's Curiosity rover imaged possible "ripples" of an ancient riverbed in 2025, and some orbital missions have spotted what may be vast underground stores of water.

The new study focused on Martian geomorphology — the study of the surface and its processes — and employed several spacecraft, including the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (which recently shared its 100,000th photo).

"The unique high-resolution satellite images of Mars have enabled us to study the Martian landscape in great detail by surveying and mapping," Ignatius Argadestya, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Bern Institute of Geological Sciences as well as the university’s Physics Institute, said in the statement.

"When measuring and mapping the Martian images, I was able to recognize mountains and valleys that resemble a mountainous landscape on Earth," Argadestya said. "However, I was particularly impressed by the deltas that I discovered at the edge of one of the mountains."

The team saw possible "fan deltas," which form when debris and sand pile up in still water. The deposits in the Martian imagery appear very similar to active fan deltas on Earth, according to the team; on our planet, these deltas pile up at entry points where rivers flow into the ocean.

All of the "deposits" were mapped at an elevation of between 11,975 and 12,300 feet (3,650 to 3,750 meters) and formed roughly 3.37 billion years ago. Given that all of the deposits are at roughly the same elevation and in a region in the northern lowlands of Mars and Valles Marineris, the researchers argue that these structures mark the boundaries of an ancient shoreline. It's likely the ocean that once flowed there spanned Mars' entire northern hemisphere, the team added.

In part drawing on past research, the scientists say this ancient Martian ocean was at least as large as the present-day Arctic Ocean.

"We are not the first to postulate the existence and size of the ocean," Fritz Schlunegger, a geology professor at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "However, earlier claims were based on less precise data and partly on indirect arguments. Our reconstruction of the sea level, on the other hand, is based on clear evidence for such a coastline, as we were able to use high-resolution images."

Astronomers have gotten a rare glimpse at four baby planets as they're growing up, and it reveals something surprising: These toddler worlds are getting lighter as they age.

The quadruplet worlds orbit in tightly packed paths around the star V1298 Tau, a young system that's just 20 million years old (compared with our sun's 4.5 billion years) located about 350 light-years from Earth. A new analysis, which drew on a decade of observations, shows that the planets are surprisingly lightweight, with low densities — so puffed up, in fact, that researchers likened them to Styrofoam.

The findings offer a rare snapshot of planetary architecture just after formation, the researchers said — a long-sought-for "missing link" between newborn disks of gas and dust and the mature planetary systems astronomers commonly observe across the Milky Way.

Those older systems are often crowded with planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune on tight, Mercury-like orbits. The origins of such worlds have remained one of astronomy's enduring mysteries.

"What's so exciting is that we're seeing a preview of what will become a very normal planetary system," study lead author John Livingston, an assistant professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said in a statement. "We've never had such a clear picture of them in their formative years."

Over time, the bloated worlds around V1298 Tau are expected to shrink as they shed their thick atmospheres, eventually becoming super-Earths and sub-Neptunes — planetary types that are absent from our own solar system but ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.

By capturing the planets at such a pivotal stage of development, the study, published Jan. 7 in the journal Nature, enables astronomers to trace the chaotic processes that sculpt planetary systems over billions of years.

'I couldn't believe it!'

The four planets orbiting V1298 Tau were first identified in 2019 in data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. One is roughly Jupiter-size, while the other three fall between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn.

What immediately set the system apart was its crowded layout of multiple oversized planets packed into relatively tight orbits — a configuration known in only one other system, Kepler-51, among more than 500 known multi-planet systems.

While the planets' existence was clear, their fundamental properties remained elusive. To pin them down, Livingston and his team embarked on a nearly decade-long observation campaign using half a dozen telescopes in space and on the ground. They tracked the planets as they passed in front of their star — events known as transits, which cause tiny dips in starlight that reveal a planet's size and orbital period.

Crucially, small variations in the timing of the transits, caused by the planets tugging gravitationally on one another, enabled the team to measure their masses. The technique is especially powerful because it is largely immune to interference from stellar flares common around young stars, the study noted.

But the method only works if astronomers know each planet's orbital period precisely — and for the outermost planet, V1298 Tau e, that information was missing. Only two of its transits had ever been observed, separated by 6.5 years across observations from Kepler and NASA's exoplanet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) telescope, leaving astronomers unsure how many transits had gone unseen in between, according to the study.

A stroke of good luck came when the ground-based Las Cumbres Observatory network — which operates telescopes in the United States, Chile and South Africa — spotted a third transit, enabling the researchers to finally lock down the planet's orbit and model the system's full gravitational choreography.

"I couldn't believe it!" study co-author Erik Petigura, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCLA, said in the statement. "The timing was so uncertain that I thought we would have to try half a dozen times at least. It was like getting a hole-in-one in golf."

The results showed that despite being five to 10 times Earth's radius, the planets have masses only five to 15 times greater than Earth's, making them among the least dense planets ever discovered, Livingston said.

"By weighing these planets for the first time, we have provided the first observational proof," study co-author Trevor David, an astrophysicist formerly at the Flatiron Institute in New York, who led the system's discovery in 2019, said in the statement. "They are indeed exceptionally 'puffy,' which gives us a crucial, long-awaited benchmark for theories of planet evolution."

The team then simulated the planets' evolution and found that they have already lost much of their original atmospheres and cooled faster than predicted by standard models.

"But they're still evolving," study co-author James Owen, an associate professor of astrophysics at Imperial College London, said in the statement. The planets are expected to continue shedding gas and contracting into super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, he said.

"Over the next few billion years, they will continue to lose their atmosphere and shrink significantly, transforming into the compact systems of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes we see throughout the galaxy," Owen added.