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Recent modelling suggests that Earth-mass planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars could evolve into rocky worlds topped by helium-dominated atmospheres.
Europa is regarded as a primary candidate for a habitable world beyond Earth, with seafloor volcanism being one potential source of the energy and chemicals needed to support life. However, a new numerical model offers a different perspective.
A new study shows that many ‘ultra-wide’ binaries (UWBs) in the Kuiper belt are not primordial but attained their present large separations during multiple encounters with other trans-Neptunian objects, and constrain Solar System formation and evolution differently than previously thought.
A model for the formation of our Solar System proposes that its population of small bodies could have been formed after a stellar encounter between our Sun and another star early on in its history.
Samples from asteroid Ryugu bear hydrated ammonium magnesium phosphorus (HAMP) grains, which have no known parallels to meteorite minerals but provide clues to the formation of Ryugu and suggest that asteroids supply bioessential elements.
Ceres’s surface is ice-rich and warm, so we expect craters to viscously flow. Yet most of Ceres’s craters are not shallow. A new model that includes a stronger, progressively dirtier icy crust, frozen from an ancient ocean, may reconcile this discrepancy.
Giant shock waves at the physical boundaries of the most massive structures in the Universe could be used as an accurate tool to measure the total mass of clusters of galaxies.
Most data for extrasolar rocky planets comes from observations of objects significantly larger than the Earth. The newly discovered SPECULOOS-3 b is a good target for efforts to characterize exoplanets closer in size to the solar system terrestrial planets.
