Cluster takes shape
The Rumba and Tango satellites were sent into space on board a French-Russia launcher. Over the next week they will rendezvous with the Salsa and Samba satellites that were launched on July 16. The fo...
Surface features on Europa explained?
Gaidos and Nimmo say that the tidal forces from Jupiter can cause regions of ice near a fault or defect to move relative to one another. This relative motion causes frictional heating that increases t...
Literate physicist gets taste for fiction
White Mars is about a group of men and women who are marooned on Mars at the end of the 21st century. Living in enormous self-perpetuating domes, they produce their own food and oxygen, and extract wa...
Asteroid threat over estimated
A collision with a Near-Earth asteroid is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Near-Earth asteroids are usually piles of rock from the Mars-Jupiter asteroid belt whose orbit ...
Light glimpsed from extra-solar planet
Light from the planet is almost completely obliterated by the bright glare from the star. Although the reflected signal is 10-20,000 times weaker than the glare from tau Bootis, the planet studied by ...
Eclipse confirms extrasolar planet
According to calculations by Marcy and colleagues, the planet has 63 percent of the mass of Jupiter and orbits the star every 3.5 days. On Thursday, the next time the star is eclipsed, more telescopes...
First evidence for planet orbiting a binary star
The majority of stars in the universe are believed to be in binary systems, but previously no one had produced any evidence to show that such systems could contain planets. The 20 planets that have be...
Do planets make diamonds from methane?
Lara Benedetti and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Missouri and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory sealed liquid methane between two diamond ‘...
The mystery of Neptune’s rings
Neptune’s ring arcs were first observed by the Voyager spacecraft in 1984. In the absence of some external source of stability the rings would have been expected to decay within a matter of mont...
Magnetic mystery on Mars
Geophysicists realised that the Earth’s crust consisted of a series of tectonic plates when they noticed that as magma flowed out of the ocean ridges and cooled, iron in the magma magnetized in ...
