No doubt about the presence of methane on the planet Mars – News of April 9, 2019 – For fifteen years, traces of methane have been detected in the atmosphere of Mars. The European Mars Express spacecraft and the American Curiosity rover have highlighted seasonal peaks of this gas. These
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The collision of the Earth with another planet would have created the Moon – News of March 24, 2019 The story of the creation of the Moon is still the subject of intense debate. The scenario of a giant impact is only one hypothesis among others. This hypothesis was formulated
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The observation of another planetary system could explain the orbit of a planet X – News of March 12, 2019 – FarFarOut is part of a class of objects named extreme transneptunians objects. Other objects in this category all have a very eccentric orbit. This is why some researchers believe
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A new moon of Neptune has just been discovered – News of February 24, 2019 – A new moon of Neptune has been known since 2013, but sometimes it takes time to formalize a discovery. It was named called Hippocamp. This moon is very small, so it looks like an
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An underground ocean would be responsible for the large fractures visible on Charon – News of February 19, 2019 – Charon, Pluto’s moon, was photographed by the spacecraft New Horizons. Charon has a diameter of 1200 km, which makes it a huge moon compared to its planet. Its icy surface
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On Venus, a greenhouse effect has been self-sustaining until CO2 depletion – News of February 17, 2019 – On the planet Earth, a large part of the CO2 is trapped in the Earth’s crust by sedimentation, in limestone for example. Only a very small part of this gas is released
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Simulations fail to fully explain the inclination of Uranus – News of February 3, 2019 – The axis of rotation of Uranus is quite unique in the solar system. This is most likely the result of a collision very early in the planet’s history, or several collisions. But it is
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The solar system could contain 200 dwarf planets – News of January 27, 2019 – The differentiation between planets and dwarf planets is very recent. Until the mid-2000s, schoolchildren learned that Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system. This changed with the discovery of many Pluto-like bodies in
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Rain would fall on Titan, a Saturn’s moon – News of January 22, 2019 – It can take years to process the data collected by a space probe. The Cassini space probe completed its mission in September 2017. It was then burnt in Saturn’s atmosphere. One of the missions of
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Io would have more than 400 active volcanoes on its surface – News of January 7, 2019 – Currently in orbit around Jupiter, the Juno space probe took a picture of Io, which highlights a volcanic plume on this moon of Jupiter. This photo reminds how Io is a unique
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The rings of Saturn could disappear – News of December 23, 2018 – The rings of Saturn are superb but we are more and more certain that they are only temporary. They could have disappeared in a few hundred million years. A new study published December 17, 2018 describes how
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The dwarf planet Ceres could shelter life Ceres is a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter and its density is relatively low. We assumed that Ceres was relatively rich in water, and the space probe Dawn confirmed it during its flights over Ceres from 2015, with its spectrometers. The
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6% of meteorites on Earth would come from Vesta In the early 2010s, the data collected by the three scientific instruments embarked on the Dawn space probe revealed the complexity of Vesta, a celestial body that could be classified between an asteroid and a planet. Like a planet, the structure
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Astronomers discover 12 new moons in orbit of Jupiter – News of July 24, 2018 – We may think that if we try to discover planets in other systems, it is because we found all that there was to find in the solar system. However, it is a misconception :
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Are there sand dunes consist of frozen methane on Pluto ? – News of June 5, 2018 – Pluto, the distant dwarf planet, is no longer so mysterious since it was flown over by the New Horizons space probe in the summer of 2015. The images from the surface have
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Like the Earth, Enceladus houses complex organic molecules – News of July 3, 2018 – Our system is rich in organic compounds. These molecules, whose composition comprises at least one carbon atom, are considered as the basic chemical elements of life. This is why they are called organic molecules. So
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Galileo reveals the existence of geysers on Europa, 20 years after its overflight – News of May 15, 2018 – Europa is suspected of harboring oceans of liquid water under a thick crust of ice. One of the key points of this hypothesis is the repeated observation of geysers on
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Mercury would house more water than expected – News of September 26, 2017 – When we think of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, we imagine a dry and desolate hell. The surprise was great when, in 2012, the Messenger space probe detected ice water at the pole of
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