Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Jan 9, 2013

See Venus Bid Crescent Moon Farewell Early Thursday

Early-bird stargazers will have rise early Thursday (Jan. 10) to catch sight of the two brightest objects in the night sky — Venus and the moon — engaged in a final pre-dawn dance. To catch the celestial sight, set your alarm clock to ring one hour before sunrise, then quickly...

Jan 10, 2013

Atmosphere of Venus Has Strange Magnetic 'Ropes'

Strange, newly discovered structures in Venus' atmosphere are redrawing scientists' perceptions of the planet's magnetic environment. The European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft spotted these enormous magnetic entities — called flux ropes — stretching for hundreds of miles in the planet's upper atmosphere, above the poles. Flux ropes have been...

Jan 30, 2013

Venus Can Have 'Comet-Like' Atmosphere

The planet Venus sometimes looks less like a planet and more like a comet, scientists say. Scientists with the European Space Agency have discovered that a part of the upper atmosphere of Venus — its ionosphere — acts surprisingly different depending on daily changes in the sun's weather. The side...

Oct 16, 2018

NASA Wants to Send Humans to Venus, to Live in Airships Floating on Clouds

Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps and even dinosaurs. In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of...

Feb 25, 2019

Failed 1970s Venus Probe Could Crash to Earth This Year

Here's another warning about incoming space hardware — but this saga has an interplanetary connection. First, we have to peel back space history to the early 1970s, just after the height of the Cold War space-race between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union launched the Cosmos...

Mar 15, 2019

What’s the Closest Planet to Earth? Not Venus, Scientists Say

What is the closest planet to Earth? The answer most people would give is Venus. But … it might actually be Mercury. Although Venus is the planet that comes closest to Earth as it sweeps by on its orbit, Mercury stays the closest to Earth the longest, according to a...

Sep 24, 2019

Did Venus, Earth's 'Twisted Sister' Hellscape Planet, Once Harbor Water — and Life?

Venus, our solar system's broiling, radiation-bombarded, sulfuric-acid-raining, toxic hellscape of a planet, may once have hosted vast oceans ... and could have been rather nice, actually. In fact, a water-covered and life-friendly Venus possibly persisted for as long as 3 billion years, scientists recently reported. But that idyllic time in...

Apr 26, 2020

See the bright 'evening star' Venus swing by the crescent moon tonight

You can see Venus and the moon in the horns of Taurus, the bull, on April 26, 2020. (Image credit: SkySafari app)The bright evening star Venus will be hard to miss this week, as the planet reaches its greatest brightness of the year on Tuesday (April 28). But first the...

Sep 13, 2020

See Venus swing by the crescent moon Monday morning

In the predawn morning sky on Monday (Sept. 14), a beautiful celestial sight will likely attract a lot of attention for early risers. A few hours before sunrise, low above the east-northeast horizon you'll see a slender sliver of a waning crescent moon. And located to its left you'll see...

Sep 14, 2020

Possible hint of life discovered on Venus

An unexplained chemical has turned up in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Scientists are tentatively suggesting it could be a sign of life. The unknown chemical is phosphine gas (PH3), a substance that on Earth mostly comes from anaerobic (non-oxygen-breathing) bacteria or anthropogenic activity — stuff humans are doing. It...

Sep 16, 2020

Venus, once billed as Earth's twin, is a hothouse (and a tantalizing target in the search for life)

As Earth's sister planet, Venus has endured a love-hate relationship when it comes to exploration. Now, new results suggest the presence of a signal of potential habitability on Venus, and the long-forgotten sibling may find itself back in the spotlight. With its orbit near the rising or setting sun, Venus...

Sep 22, 2020

'Grand claims' of life on Venus lack evidence, skeptics say

Last week, a team of researchers told the world that they had detected a molecule in the upper cloud layers of Venus typically only created by living creatures here on Earth. The blockbuster announcement of finding phosphine in the clouds of Venus made a major splash in the news. But...

Sep 30, 2020

Did NASA detect a hint of life on Venus in 1978 and not realize it?

If life does exist on Venus, NASA may have first detected it back in 1978. But the finding went unnoticed for 42 years. Life on Venus is still a long shot. But there's reason to take the idea seriously. On Sept. 14, a team of scientists made a bombshell announcement...

Jun 23, 2021

Venus has a gooey flowing mantle jostling crust chunks on its surface

Venus may still be geologically active today, which could mean that Earth's planetary sibling is a good place for scientists to learn about early Earth and faraway worlds. An international team of scientists used old radar images from NASA's Magellan mission, which ended operations in 2004, to study the Venusian...

Jun 30, 2021

No hope for life in Venus clouds

The amount of water in the atmosphere of Venus is so low that even the most drought-tolerant of Earth's microbes wouldn't be able to survive there, a new study has found. The findings seem to wipe out the hope stirred by last year's discovery of molecules potentially created by living...