China's Yutu-2 rover has sent back a new image of the unusual "gel-like" material it found last July, which seems to confirm that it's not gel at all. Instead, it now appears it's probably impact glass from a meteorite impact.
Where can we expect to find life beyond Earth? A new study has redefined the lower limit in mass for habitable exoworlds. It suggests that low-mass waterworlds might exist and might be a place to look.
Ten years ago, scientists speculated that warm dust in the exoplanet system BD +20 307 - located 300 light years away - had resulted from a planet-to-planet collision. Now astronomers see 10% more warm dust in this system, further supporting the idea of a collision between worlds.
For a brief time in 1976, it seemed as if NASA's Viking landers had found microbes on Mars! Those results have been vigorously disputed in the years since, but the original experiment's principal investigator, Gilbert Levin, still maintains they really did detect Martian microbes.
A new study from Brown University suggests that different deposits of ice at the moon's south pole not only originated from different sources, but also vary greatly in age.
Astronomers in Poland have just published the 1st peer-reviewed paper on the 2nd interstellar visitor, now officially labeled as a comet, 2I/Borisov. Plus check out the new Hubble Space Telescope image of this object.
Nebula IC 63 - in the direction of our constellation Cassiopeia - is slowly dissipating under the influence of ionizing ultraviolet radiation from a hot, luminous variable star known as Gamma Cas.
Exoplanets - worlds orbiting distant suns - are very, very far away. Astronomers are learning what some might look like, and what's in their atmospheres. Soon - for the first time - a new telescope will be able to "see inside" some exoplanets.