What are Comet Tails Made Of?
26.03.1996

The tail of comet Hyakutake, visible in this recent color image, is composed of dust and gas driven off the icy comet nucleus by the Sun's heat and blown away by the solar wind. Bathed in solar ultraviolet light, the gas molecules break down and are excited, producing a characteristic glow.

Titan from Cassini in Infrared
6.07.2004

Could life exist under the smog of Titan? If not, what is creating all of the methane? To help answer these questions, the largest and most mysterious moon of Saturn got a quick first look from the Cassini robot spacecraft soon after entering orbit around the giant planet last week.

Earth size Kepler 186f
19.04.2014

Planet Kepler-186f is the first known Earth-size planet to lie within the habitable zone of a star beyond the Sun. Discovered using data from the prolific planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, the distant world orbits...

Flying Over Plutos Moon Charon
22.02.2016

Given some poetic license, there is now scientific evidence that hell has frozen over. To start, Greek mythology holds that Charon is the ferryman of the underworld. Next, recent analysis of data taken...

Goldilocks Zones and Stars
31.01.2020

The Goldilocks zone is the habitable zone around a star where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of orbiting planets. This intriguing infographic...

LL Ori and the Orion Nebula
20.01.2006

This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features LL Orionis, interacting with the Orion Nebula flow. Adrift in Orion's stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun.

Pluto Flyover from New Horizons
31.07.2017

What if you could fly over Pluto -- what might you see? The New Horizons spacecraft did just this in 2015 July as it shot past the distant world at a speed of about 80,000 kilometers per hour.

The 47 Ursae Majoris System
17.08.2001

Watching and waiting, astronomers have uncovered the presence of more than 70 planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. So far almost all these extrasolar planets have crazy elongated orbits, lie uncomfortably close to their parent stars, or are found in bizarre, inhospitable systems.

The South Pole of Mars
13.12.2001

The south pole of Mars is the bright area near the center of the detailed, subtly shaded color image above. Recorded in September of this year by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft, the picture shows a region surrounding the 400 kilometer wide martian polar cap in the midst of southern hemisphere spring.

An Atlas V Rocket Launches OSIRIS REx
17.10.2016

Have you ever seen a rocket launched into the Solar System? Last month a large Atlas V rocket blasted off from Launch Complex 41 in Florida carrying the ORISIX-REx spacecraft. This robotic spacecraft will attempt to land on Asteroid Bennu and return some of its soil to Earth.