Solar Systems Archives - Escape Velocity Space News

Topic: Solar Systems

New Horizons 10 Years Later

by Pamela Gay | Jul 30, 2025 | Solar Systems

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the New Horizons spacecraft making its historic flyby of Pluto. The mission is still healthy and still being used for science and has recently demonstrated that astral navigation is possible, even from inside our solar system. From it’s location in the Kuiper Belt, it has been able to measure shifts in the observed locations of nearby stars compared to background objects, and researchers could use those shifts to calculate the missions position. While it’s way easier to use techniques like measure light travel times and such, it’s cool to know the...

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Get Thee Outside! The Perseids Are Coming!

by Pamela Gay | Jul 29, 2025 | Solar Systems

The Perseids are best viewed on August 12 and 13 but can be seen from now through August 24 as the Earth passes through debris left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. Overlapping with the bright Perseids is the Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower, which peak on July 30...

Comets Escape and Comets Visit

by Pamela Gay | Jul 28, 2025 | Solar Systems

Growing up, I remember learning that comets could have elliptical, parabolic, or hyperbolic orbits. At the time, this was all about learning conic sections, and ellipticity of orbits, and it never really occurred to me that all those comets on escape orbits had to go...

Distant Worlds Were Flung as Youth

by Pamela Gay | Jul 28, 2025 | Solar Systems

Image credit: NASA One of the things that continues to amaze me is how much we still have to learn about solar system formation. Understanding how our universe seeded solar systems in so much variety is work it will take generations to fully understand, but we are...

Mapping the Solar System

by Pamela Gay | Jul 27, 2025 | Solar Systems

Here in the inner solar system, we live in the land of rocky objects and cratered planets. While the largest concentration of rocky objects are gathered up in the Asteroid Belt, the entire inner solar system has swarming rocky objects of various sizes. At the most...

Welcome, Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS!

by Pamela Gay | Jul 16, 2025 | Solar Systems

Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS I want to call your attention to an assuming moving dot. Catalogued as 3I/ATLAS, this high speed dot is moving at more than the escape velocity of our Solar System as it comes crashing through on its journey through the Milky Way. This dot...

Closer Look: Rubin Observatory

by Pamela Gay | Jun 25, 2025 | Galaxies & Cosmology, In-depth, Solar Systems, Stars & Nebulae, Technology

In the early 2000s, the massive scientific return from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey made it clear that there are questions we can only answer by investing in systems that survey the sky and inventory everything visible. From learning about the distribution of galaxies...

Stellar side swipes can send unseatbelted planets flying

by Pamela Gay | Jun 5, 2025 | Solar Systems

Illustration of a poorly lit planet. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, and R. Hurt I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again - our understanding of the solar system advances at the pace of technology. As our processing power grows, we are able to do more and more...

Closer Look: Finding Planets in all the Wrong Places

by Pamela Gay | May 15, 2025 | Solar Systems

There are days when it seems that our outer solar system has the singular goal of frustrating astronomers. In a way, we have no one to blame but Newton. After all, his equations of motion allowed researchers to realize that Uranus’ motion required something to be...

Weird light could mean Aliens, but probably doesn’t

by Pamela Gay | May 15, 2025 | Earth Science, Solar Systems

Image of an Eagle of Big Bear Observatory shown with a plot of how birds affect light measurements. There are a lot of really solid scientists putting thought and observational time toward looking for life orbiting other stars. From searching for biosignatures in...

Weird chemistry could mean Aliens, but probably doesn’t

by Pamela Gay | May 14, 2025 | Solar Systems

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM Not a week goes by without JWST finding something new and press-worthy. Given the cost of this telescope, this is as it should be. And weirdly, at least some of the things has found are not aliens despite people’s best attempts to say...

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