gas giants
-
New Moons Discovered Around Uranus and Neptune
Astronomers found a new moon orbiting Uranus, as well as two around Neptune. The tiny satellites appeared as faint specks in the outer reaches of the solar system following hours of ground-based observations. Using observatories in Chile and Hawaii, Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, first spotted the Uranian moon on…
-
Then and Now: Our Earliest Close-Ups of the Planets Compared to Today’s Best Shots
For centuries, astronomers were limited to ground-based observations of the planets, but now we use spacecraft to capture close-up views of our neighboring worlds. Excitingly, our views of solar system planets have been getting progressively better over the decades, as these images attest. The dawn of the Space Age finally made it possible for humankind…
-
The Webb Telescope Finally Snaps Saturn’s Luminous Rings
The Webb Space Telescope has taken an image of the ringed planet Saturn, completing its photo album of our solar system’s gas giants.
-
A 1980s Space Telescope May Have Seen Planet Nine
In 1983, astronomer Michael Rowan-Robinson conducted a search for a proposed 10th planet (Pluto still being a planet at the time) using data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, the first infrared space telescope. Rowan-Robinson didn’t turn up a new planet, and by 1991, he was pretty sure that such a planet did not exist, at…