Articles tagged as Solar System | Smithsonian Magazine

Five New Things We Learned About Pluto This Week

A new set of studies paints Pluto as a weirder planet than scientists once thought

March 18, 2016

An artist's rendering of the sweltering surface of Venus.

A Giant Planetary Smashup May Have Turned Venus Hot and Hellish

A collision with a large object may have triggered changes deep inside the planet that ultimately affected its atmosphere

March 10, 2016

The leap year has a long history, stretching all the way back to 46 B.C.E.

February 29, 2016

New Research

Pluto’s North Pole Is Streaked With Canyons

Enormous pits and frozen valleys straddle Pluto’s northern hemisphere

February 26, 2016

An artist's rendering of Planet Nine, looking back toward the Sun. This depiction is of a gaseous planet, like Uranus and Neptune, with lightning brightening the clouds on the dark side.

New Research

Evidence Stacks Up for a Planet Beyond Pluto

A new paper provides the strongest evidence yet for a real Planet X

January 20, 2016

The five planets will be visible to the naked eye, but a telescope can add another layer of delight

Five planets will appear together in the sky—all visible to the naked eye

January 20, 2016

The back shell of NASA’s InSight spacecraft being lowered onto the lander, last July, in preparation for the mission.

A leak in a key instrument on board the InSight lander means the team will have to wait for the next launch window in 2018

December 23, 2015

Left: Alan Stern holds a 2005 Hubble image of the Pluto system on January 19, 2006, two hours after the successful launch of the New Horizons probe. Right: A triumphant Stern holds a full-frame image of Pluto, taken just hours before the New Horizons probe reached its closest point to Pluto.

American Ingenuity Awards

How Alan Stern Brought Pluto to Earth

The scientist behind NASA’s New Horizons mission gave cheering earthlings their first close-up view of the dwarf planet

November 12, 2015

This composite image features Pluto and its largest moon Charon in enhanced color.

New Research

Sorry Pluto, You Still Aren’t a Planet

A new test for planetary status leaves the diminutive world and its dwarf planet kin out of the family portrait

November 11, 2015

An artist's rendering of the MOA-2011-BLG-262 system, which hosts a potential exomoon orbiting a Jupiter-like planet.

New Research

In a Rare Pairing, a Venus-Like Planet Has Been Found Around a “Failed Star”

The system offers clues to the way planets and moons form and may aid in the quest to find habitable worlds across the galaxy

November 2, 2015

Light reflecting off Saturn illuminates the plumes shooting out of Enceladus in this 2013 Cassini image.

New Research

NASA Spacecraft Heads for Deepest Ever Dive Into Saturn Moon’s Plumes

Cassini will plunge into the watery geysers to search for evidence of hydrothermal vents and other clues about the moon’s hidden ocean

October 26, 2015

Comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) on 12 February 2015

New Research

Comet Lovejoy is One Boozy Space Rock

The greenish comet that lit up the sky last January releases as much alcohol as 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak

October 26, 2015

An artist’s rendering shows a white dwarf star shredding a rocky asteroid.

New Research

Dead Star Shredding a Rocky Body Offers a Preview of Earth’s Fate

The stellar corpse spotted by a NASA telescope backs up a theory that white dwarf stars eat planetary remnants

October 21, 2015

A color composite image highlighting pluto's brilliant diversity of color and texture. The western lobe of the heart—an area rich with nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ice—is brightly displayed in the right of the image.

First Official Data From the Pluto Flyby Reshapes the Dwarf Planet’s History

“The ‘little spacecraft that could’ is making a lot of big discoveries,” says Alan Stern

October 16, 2015

An artist's interpretation of what ancient Mars may have looked like

New Research

The Past and Present of Mars Look Wetter and Wetter

From salty streaks of flowing water to an ancient system of rivers and lakes, Mars seems more hospitable to life than previously thought

October 8, 2015

Cool Finds

How to Build a Seven-Mile-Wide Scale Model of the Solar System

It takes three-and-a-half miles to get from the Sun to Pluto

September 21, 2015

A mosaic of high-resolution images of Pluto shows the icy plane informally called Sputnik Planum.

“If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”

September 11, 2015

An aurora glows near Australia in a photo taken from the International Space Station. Auroras are products of charged particles from the sun interacting with Earth's magnetic field.

Earth’s Magnetic Field Is at Least Four Billion Years Old

Tiny grains of Australian zircon hold evidence that our magnetic shielding was active very soon after the planet formed

July 30, 2015

New Horizons snapped this parting shot of Pluto on July 15, 2015.

New Horizons Snaps a Final Shot of Pluto

So long, dwarf planet!

July 24, 2015

Turns out Pluto is covered in ice mountains up to 11,000 feet high.

Behold, the First Closeup Pictures From the Pluto Flyby Are Here

From fresh-faced moons to ice mountains, these are the visual surprises that hit the ground the day after the Pluto flyby

July 15, 2015