Doubt has been cast on the possibility of a lake of liquid water buried beneath Mars’ southern ice cap by new computer simulations, which suggest that closely compacted layers of ice could produce the same radar reflections that liquid water would. In 2018, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter used its MARSIS (Mars Advanced […]
Pluto’s surface, fitting for a world whose surface shivers at a cryogenic -364 F (-220 C), is frozen solid. But beneath that nitrogen ice may lie a subsurface ocean of liquid water. A recent study suggested what that ocean might look like: It might be deeper than Earth’s crust and denser than Earth’s seawater. It […]
Since 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has repeatedly detected methane on Mars, specifically near its landing site inside the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater. But that Mars methane is behaving erratically. It only appears at night, it fluctuates seasonally and it spikes unexpectedly to levels 40 times higher than usual. To make things more puzzling, the […]
As far as we know, life needs water. Due to this simple truth, astronomers and astrobiologists have naturally focused their efforts on identifying exoplanets that might harbor liquid oceans. Water in its liquid form can exist on a planet’s surface, where direct heat from its host star can keep the substance from freezing — but […]