A rendering of an orange and grey planet against a dark background.
Features

Noble Gases Along for the Ride

How did neon end up inside Earth’s mantle, and what does that tell us about how our planet formed?

J0749+2255

Hydrocarbons keep turning up in surprising places. This time, they’ve been found near a pair of accreting supermassive black holes 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Mars from Mars Global Surveyor
Astrobites

What if Mars Were a Stranger (Thing)?

Astrobites reports on whether we’d even know what we were looking at if our familiar red neighbor were a stranger light-years away.

The galaxies FCC 224 and FCC 240 appear to be a rare example of a dark-matter-poor, globular-cluster-rich pair formed via colliding dwarf galaxies.

Messier 64

A recent study used the kinematics, chemical composition, and ages of thousands of stars to determine when the Milky Way settled into the spiral disk we know it as today.

white dwarf with debris disk

White dwarfs with metals in their spectra preserve a record of planets that once orbited them. New research examines these spectra for signs that the metals underwent technological processing.

side-by-side images of Venus's surface today and an imagining of what its surface might have looked like in the past
Astrobites

Can Arid Planets Keep Their Cool?

Astrobites reports on why dry planets may be missing the critical thermostat of the geologic carbon cycle, which has helped to stabilize Earth’s climate over billions of years.

close-up image of the Sun showing a solar flare

When a powerful solar flare saturates a detector, the information about the flare is lost — or is it? New research validates a technique for extracting knowledge from saturated images of solar flares.