Scientific American

Mars and Mercury Star at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:00:00 EST

New Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System's Innermost Planet [More]

Ballooning Star Split Planet in Two

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:39:08 EST

In about five billion years, Earth is going into the broiler. The sun will swell up into a red giant, engulfing us and the other inner planets . And that'll be that.

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Entrepreneurs Race to Get a Rover on the Moon and Win $30 Million (preview)

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EST

On a muddy, rubble-strewn field on the banks of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, a five-foot-tall pyramidal robot with twin camera eyes slowly rotates on four metal wheels, its electric motors emitting a low whine. In a nearby trailer, students from Carnegie Mellon University huddle around a laptop to watch the world through the robot’s eyes. In the low-resolution grayscale images on the laptop’s screen, the rutted landscape looks a lot like the moon, which is the robot’s ultimate destination.

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New Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System's Innermost Planet

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST

THE WOODLANDS, Tex.--Mercury is a world of extremes . Daytime temperature on the planet closest to the sun can soar as high as 400 degrees Celsius near the equator, hot enough to melt lead. When day turns to night, the planet’s surface temperature plunges to below –150 degrees C.

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Martian Water Stuck in Minerals

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:12:08 EST

Mars today is pretty dry. But billions of years ago, water flowed across the Red Planet. It ran in rivers that carved deep valleys. And it may have even filled a Martian ocean inside what today look like the remains of ancient shorelines.

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Controversy Surrounds Russia's Claim that Cosmic Rays Caused Mars Mission Failure

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

A heartbreaking, out-of-the-gate failure of Russia’s sample return mission early this year created a wide circle of disappointment. For Russia, it was supposed to be a "cavalry charge" toward a hyperambitious goal that would have redeemed a quarter-century of interplanetary impotence but instead became a cosmic humiliation when the craft died shortly after liftoff. For planetary science, it meant that the composition of the Martian moon Phobos remains speculative and its origins still undetermined. For future human space strategies, the possibility of obtaining valuable supplies of oxygen en route to Mars , as the Phobos-Grunt mission was intended to determine, remains uncertain.

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Evidence for Flowing Water on Mars Grows Stronger

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:05:00 EST

THE WOODLANDS, Tex.--Today's Mars is a frigid desert, a place where water--the key to life as we know it--has gone into hiding. Whatever water may have once existed on Mars in rivers, lakes or even oceans is now frozen into ice caps, locked up in hydrated minerals or buried in debris-coated glaciers .

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"Chum Cam" Helps Catalogue Endangered Sharks

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:15:00 EST

Scientists have been trying to answer the question of whether marine protected areas, where sharks and their prey are off-limits to fishermen, are indeed home to more sharks than non-protected areas of the ocean.

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Earthshine Sets Example for Life-Light Search

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:34:08 EST

How can we search for life on exoplanets? Step one: examine the Earth as if it were an exoplanet. That’s the idea behind a recent look at earthshine.

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Hell off Earth: Blustery Exoplanet Charted in 2-D for First Time

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

A mere 60 light-years away, orbiting an orangish star called HD 189733, is a world an Earthling would not want to visit. The planet is a gas giant, like Jupiter or Saturn, but unlike those familiar worlds this one hugs tightly to its host star, orbiting at about one thirtieth the distance at which Earth circles the sun. The exoplanet , labeled HD 189733 b by astronomical convention, stays mighty toasty under its astronomical broiler, with temperatures upward of 900 degrees Celsius.

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Readers Respond to "Can We Feed the World and Sustain the Planet?" and Other Articles

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

ENTOMOLOGICAL ETHICS [More]

Red Sea: Sounding Radar Buoys Evidence Mars Once Had an Ocean

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

In the eyes of many planetary scientists, the surface of Mars's northern hemisphere has long looked like it once contained an ocean. Now it is "sounding" that way, too.

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Hunter's Moons: Astronomers Use Kepler Spacecraft to Search for Exomoons

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

Astronomers have discovered a trove of exoplanets --more than 700 worlds in orbit around distant stars, with leads on thousands of additional suspects. So now, naturally, they're beginning to ask: What moons might be in orbit about these planets?

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Newfound Alien Planet Is Best Candidate Yet to Support Life, Scientists Say

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:15:00 EST

A potentially habitable alien planet -- one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface -- has been found around a nearby star.

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Thanks to Plants, We Will Never Find a Planet Like Earth

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

Astronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants.

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Kepler Finds Multiple Exoplanets around Single Stars

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:52:08 EST

Two decades ago, the only known planetary system started at Mercury and ended at Pluto.

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Binary Stars Have Plenty of Planets

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:19:08 EST

Several planets in our solar system have multiple moons. But in other planetary systems the orbital dance can get far more compelling. Astronomers are finding that some faraway worlds orbit multiple suns.

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Three Tiny Exoplanets Suggest Solar System Not So Special

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:30:00 EST

Adding to its already long roster of firsts , NASA's Kepler spacecraft has found the three smallest extrasolar planets ever detected -- all of them smaller than Earth, and the most diminutive no larger than Mars. The newly discovered trio forms a miniature planetary system orbiting a cool, dim red dwarf star called KOI-961.

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A Plenitude of Planets: Galactic Search Finds Exoplanets Are More Commonplace Than Stars

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:30:00 EST

The next time you look up at the night sky and find yourself marveling at the number of stars overhead, know that you are only seeing part of the magnificent bounty that our galaxy holds. Most of those Milky Way stars are not isolated orbs. Rather an average star has at least one planetary companion , invisible to the naked eye and in most cases as yet unseen by telescopes, according to a new analysis.

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The Top 10 Science Stories of 2011

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:00:00 EST

Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American 's is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks" zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets . Or noted the accumulating evidence suggesting that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to retrieve natural gas is likely to contaminate water supplies. (Final New York State regulations, expected in mid-2012, could determine the future of fracking in the U.S.)

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