Atmosphere

Mars haunts us as a vision of a planet gone wrong. It was once warm and wet, with rivers flowing across its surface and (potentially) simple life residing in its water bodies. Now it’s dry and freezing. Could Earth suffer this fate? Are there innumerable other worlds throughout the Universe that were habitable for a…

Astronomers have found some pretty wild exoplanets. Some are balls of lava the temperature of hell, one is partially made of diamond, and another may rain molten iron. However, not all exoplanets are this extreme. Some are rocky, roughly Earth-sized worlds in the habitable zones of their stars. Could simple Earth life survive on some…

We’ve already seen the success of the Ingenuity probe on Mars. The first aircraft to fly on another world set off on its maiden voyage in April 2021 and has now completed 72 flights. Now a team of engineers are taking the idea one step further and investigating ways that drones can be released from…

Uranus is an oddball among the Solar System’s planets. While most planets’ axis of rotation is perpendicular to their orbital plane, Uranus has an extreme tilt angle of 98 degrees. It’s flopped over on its side, likely from an ancient collision. It also has a retrograde orbit, opposite of the other planets. The ice giant…

We are all familiar with the atmosphere of the Earth and part of this, the ionosphere, is a layer of weakly ionized plasma. It extends from 50 to 1,500 km above the planet. It’s a diffuse layer but sufficient to interfere with satellite communications and navigation systems too. A team of researchers have come up…

Will we ever understand how life got started on Earth? We’ve learned much about Earth’s long, multi-billion-year history, but a detailed understanding of how the planet’s atmospheric chemistry evolved still eludes us. At one time, Earth was atmospherically hostile, and its transition from that state to a planet teeming with life followed a complex path.…

Filmmakers love New Zealand. Its landscapes evoke other worlds, which explains why so much of The Lord of the Rings was filmed there. The country has everything from long, subtropical sandy beaches to active volcanoes. The country’s otherworldliness extends into its atmosphere, where a cloud nicknamed the “Taieri Pet” forms when conditions are right. The…

Climate change is a huge topic and often debated across the world. We continue to burn fossil fuels and ignore our charge toward human driven climate change but while our behaviour never seems to improve, something else does! For the last few decades we have been pumping chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere causing a hole in…

The JWST has found an exoplanet unlike any other. This unique world has an atmosphere almost entirely composed of water vapour. Astronomers have theorized about these types of planets, but this is the first observational confirmation. The unique planet is GJ 9827 d. It’s about twice as large as Earth and three times as massive,…

Few scientists doubt that Mars was once warm and wet. The evidence for a warm, watery past keeps accumulating, and even healthy skepticism can’t dismiss it. All this evidence begs the next question: what happened to it? Mars bears the marks of a past when water flowed freely across its surface. There are clear river…