planet

NASA’s beleaguered InSight lander on Mars has detected a magnitude 5 “marsquake” — the largest one the spacecraft has felt yet since landing on the planet in November of 2018. It’s a major moment that comes during a fraught time for InSight, as the spacecraft’s solar panels continue to gather dust that will eventually bring an end to the vehicle’s life on Mars. InSight’s mission on the Red Planet has been to probe the interior of Mars, primarily by sensing for tremors from the surface. Unlike quakes here on Earth,…

An artist illustration of the InSight lander on Mars. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough checkup since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechEstimated to be magnitude 5, the quake is the strongest ever detected on another planet.NASA’s InSight Mars lander has detected the largest quake ever observed on another planet: an estimated magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022, the…

Planets outside of our Solar System are rather dull things. So dull, we can only see them directly by sifting out a scattering of reflected rays amid the glare of their parent star. Even then, the best we can manage is a pinprick to identify its position.  Gathering enough light to reveal intricate details of these distant worlds would require a lens far larger than anything we can construct. One wider than Earth. Wider than Jupiter, in fact.Fortunately, cosmic-scale lenses happen to exist already. Thanks to the way that…

Hidden below the waves, the ocean contains vast reserves of sugar that we never were aware of, according to new research.Scientists have discovered that seagrass meadows on the ocean floor can store huge amounts of the sweet stuff underneath their waving fronds – and there are major implications for carbon storage and climate change.  The sugar comes in the form of sucrose (the main ingredient of sugar used in the kitchen), and it's released from the seagrasses into the soil underneath, an area directly affected by the…

As humanity fights to keep its only planet from becoming inhospitable, most of the focus will rightly be on decarbonizing everything we practically can. But it won't be enough. Direct air capture will need to be part of the equation, and it'll need to be massively scalable, energy efficient and much, much cheaper than today's technology, so it can become profitable quickly as carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes kick in globally. London startup Brilliant Planet believes it has a carbon capture and sequestration…

A team of astronomers has discovered a new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun. The candidate planet, named Proxima d, is the third detected in the system and it is among the lightest of the exoplanets discovered so far. Proxima d is only a quarter of the mass of Earth and orbits extremely close to its parent star, at one-tenth of the distance between the Sun and the Solar System's innermost planet, Mercury. So, the alien world is just short of the distance Proxima Centauri is from our solar…

Finding traces of life on other planets is one of the most intriguing and exciting aspects of astronomy. Scientists have long aspired to identify planets that may one day be habitable. With that distant goal in mind, a group of Indian researchers – two students and a professor -- has found not one but 60 planets, out of a total of 5,000 known, that may be potentially habitable. To reach this conclusion, the group relied on an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based method named Multi-Stage Memetic Binary Tree Anomaly…