Jupiter is often described as the "big brother" planet of our solar system that made the formation and evolution of Earth possible. In the early days of the solar system, massive Jupiter helped the planet grow rapidly while serving as a gravity well that shielded the planet from the most violent planetesimal, asteroid and debris …
Pam Conrad: The NASA Astrobiologist Who Also Became a Minister
Science and religion so often seem to be in conflict, with the chasm between them widening all the time. For many, the grounding of their religion is in faith and belief in powers beyond our understanding. For people of science, the grounding is in empirical facts and measurements that can be tested to help explain …
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What the JWST is Learning About Exoplanet Atmospheres
The James Webb Space Telescope is beginning to reveal previously unknowable facts about the composition of exoplanets -- about the presence or absence of atmospheres around the exoplanets and the makeup of any atmospheres that are detected. The results have been coming in for some months and they are a delight to scientists. And as …
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A Scientific Bonanza From Asteroid Ryugu and Hayabusa2
Collecting and transporting back to Earth samples of other planets, moons, asteroids and comets is extremely difficult, costly and time-consuming. But as just-released papers based on Japan's Hayabusa2 sample return mission to the asteroid Ryugu make abundantly clear, the results can be fabulous. In a series of articles in the journal Science, scientists who studied …
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A New Twist On Planet Formation
Before the first exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s, our own solar system served as the model for what solar systems looked like. The physical and chemical dynamics that formed our system were also seen as the default model for what might have occurred in solar systems yet to be found. As the number of …
The World of Water Worlds
Among the most intriguing types of exoplanet expected to be orbiting distant stars is the "water world," planets that are liquid to a far, far greater extent than on Earth. Astronomers have theorized the existence of such planets and several candidates have been put forward, though not confirmed. But the logic is strong enough for …
New Research Finds The Very Early Solar System Went Through an Especially Intense Period of Asteroid Collisions
In the earliest days of our solar system -- before any planets had been cobbled together -- the recently formed Sun was circled by cosmic gas and dust. Over time, fragments of rock formed from the dust and many of these orbiting rocks smashed together and some became the gradually larger components of planets-to-be. Others …
The World’s Most Capable Space Telescope Readies To Observe. What Will Exoplanet Scientists Be Looking For?
The decades-long process of developing, refining, testing, launching, unfurling and now aligning and calibrating the most capable space telescope in history is nearing fruition. While NASA has already released a number of "first light" images of photons of light moving through the James Webb Space Telescope's optical system, the jaw-dropping "first light" that has all …
What The James Webb Space Telescope Can Do For Exoplanet Science and What It Cannot Do
When the James Webb Space Telescope finally launches (late this month, if the schedule holds) it will forever change astronomy. Assuming that its complex, month-long deployment in space works as planned, it will become the most powerful and far-seeing observatory in the sky. It will have unprecedented capabilities to probe the earliest days of the …
Why Does Our Solar System Have No Super-Earths, and Other Questions for Comparative Planetology
Before the explosion in discovery of extrasolar planets, the field of comparative planetology was pretty limited -- confined to examining the differences between planets in our solar system and how they may have come to pass. But over the past quarter century, comparative planetology and the demographics of planets came to mean something quite different. …
Many Worlds 