Landslides can be impressively huge and fast and can occur on all sorts of places including asteroids, rocky moons and Mars! Giulia Magnarini Post Doctoral Researcher at the Natural History Museum in London writes all about these gigantic landslides and the clues they could hold into the martian past! Gigantic landslides are ubiquitous in our solar system. Indeed, Earth, Mars, Mercury, Venus, aste ...[Read More]
Stellar storms in other worlds: implications for the stability of exoplanetary atmospheres
Stellar storms modify the atmospheric evolution of planets. ‘Hot Jupiter’ planets being very close to their host star, are often affected by such storms. In this week’s peculiar planet, Gopal Hazra, a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, discusses effect of stellar storms on those planets using his self-consistent hydrodynamic models of planetary ...[Read More]
Brown Dwarfs: Cloudy with A Chance of Earth’s Mantle
The universe is made up of stars and planets but have you ever wondered if there is anything in between? This week, Laci Brock, a PhD student from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, takes us on a journey into this murky region of stellar classification… Four years before the cult classic science fiction show Star Trek debuted on television in 1966, astrophysicist Dr. Shiv ...[Read More]
On the way back to Mercury
It is the smallest planet of the Solar System, the closest to the Sun and the quickest at orbiting around it, the one with the least inclined and most elongated orbit, the only one where a day lasts two-thirds of a full year, the one with the highest bulk density. Mercury is a planet of extremes, but rarely visited by space missions (compared to Mars, Venus and the Moon). This week Dr. Nicola Tosi ...[Read More]