Scientists claim that helium rain is the best explanation for the scarcity of neon in the outer layers of Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet. Neon dissolves in the helium raindrops and falls…

The combination of a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array has given astronomers the clearest view to date of the "star factories" in SMM J2135-0102, a galaxy over 10 billion…

Anyone can help discover new stuff in Galaxy Zoo- but why do people bother in the first place? In the podcast "Why Go to the Zoo?", Jordan Raddick responds with some unexpected insight into why…

The newly discovered gas giant Corot-9b may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System, according to a new paper published today in Nature. Some…

I'm launching a satellite to make music from the ionosphere. But what would that look like, in a dramatic sense? In an evocative sense? In a perfect world, I could just ask a couple of children to…

New Thermal images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm…

Until recently, it was thought that white dwarfs could not exceed what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit, a critical mass equaling about 1.4 times that of the Sun, before exploding in a supernova…

The asteroid 1999 RQ36 may be able to tell scientists how the solar system was born, and perhaps, shed light on how life began. The chunk of rock and dust, about 1,900 feet in diameter, also might…

An international team of space physicists reports that Mars is constantly losing part of its atmosphere to space as a result of pressure from solar wind pulses. Their new study in Geophysical…

An analysis in Nature of more than 70,000 galaxies by a team of physicists suggests that the universe – at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth – plays by the rules set out 95…