Category Archives: planets

The changing picture of the Martian core

It’s now been almost a year since NASA’s InSight lander – home of the first seismograph ever deployed on Mars – was declared dead. But the picture of the Red Planet’s interior being deduced from the four years of seismic … Continue reading

Categories: geophysics, planets

A volcano erupted on Venus in the 1990s!

Exciting news that there was a volcanic eruption on Venus in the early 1990s, shown by changes in the size of crater between two passes of the Magellan probe‘s radar over the same area. There have been hints of volcanic … Continue reading

Categories: planets, volcanoes

Juno reveals Europa’s evolving surface

About a month ago, NASA’s Juno probe buzzed the Jovian moon Jupiter, and we got this cool picture, taken from a distance of about 400 km away. The grooves and ridges criss-crossing Europa’s icy shell are thought to record water from … Continue reading

Categories: geology, planets, structures, tectonics

Weird rocky exoplanets

Obtaining the composition of rocky exoplanets from the spectral signature produced when their dying parent star eats them is already pretty mind-blowing. But the results – which suggest that on some of these worlds, quartz is substituted for olivine in their … Continue reading

Categories: geology, planets, rocks & minerals

Older than the solar system

As Carl Sagan once said, “we are made of star stuff“: and here some of it is; mineral grains formed around distant suns, hundreds of millions of years before our solar system was born. These grains of silicon carbide were … Continue reading

Categories: deep time, geology, planets