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Beyond Neptune lies a reservoir of... icy debris left to roam the solar system's dim outer limits having never coalesced into planets... Named for astronomer Gerard Kuiper, who in 1951 predicted the existence of this 3-billion-kilometer-wide swath of icy chunks, the Kuiper belt didn't begin to reveal itself to observers until 1992. Since then, researchers have found more than a thousand bodies filling a doughnut-shaped belt, which extends 30 to about 50 astronomical units from the sun. One astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and sun... The puffed-up, elongated orbits and present-day sparseness of the belt all...

For scientists who spend time thinking about how planets form, life would be simpler if gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn didn’t exist. According to the standard model of planet formation, called "core accretion," planets form over millions of years as enormous blocks of rock and ice smash together to form planetary embryos, called "protoplanets," and eventually full-fledged planets. Most scientists agree that core accretion is how terrestrial planets such as Earth and Mars were created, but the model can’t convincingly explain how gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn came to be. One major problem is that developing gas...

Are you ready for some lunar versus planetary occultation action? One of the best events for 2014 occurs early this Wednesday morning on February 26th, when the waning crescent Moon — sometimes referred to as a decrescent Moon — meets up with a brilliant Venus in the dawn sky. This will be a showcase event for the ongoing 2014 dawn apparition of Venus that we wrote about recently. This is one of 16 occultations of a planet by our Moon for 2014, which will hide every naked eye classical planet except Jupiter and only one of two involving Venus this...

Explanation: If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn's "appendages" disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn's unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear. This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn's ring plane. A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw...

You're looking at a newly released 8-frame movie of Saturn's enigmatic "hexagon." It is the highest-resolution footage ever acquired of the massive six-sided maelstrom atop the ringed planet's north pole, and boy howdy is it gorgeous. For the uninitiated, Saturn's uncannily symmetric cloud system measures roughly 20,000-miles across, and is utterly unique in our solar system. Its dimensions and dynamics are just bizarre. At the hexagon's center whirls a tightly wound hurricane roughly fifty-times larger than the average hurricane-eye on Earth. About it spins an assortment of smaller vortices, caught up in the hexagon's jet stream, that rotate clockwise, even...

The deadly tsunami on December 26, 2004 was the result of Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun falling in a straight line, claims a retired scientist of Department of Atomic Energy. Paramahamsa Tewari, who supervised construction of Narora and Kaiga atomic plants and authored controversial "space vortex theory", says his conclusion about the cause of tsunami stems from his theory that all spinning cosmic objects including the Sun develop electrical fields that repel each other. On the fateful day, Saturn, Moon, Earth and the Sun were perfectly aligned. As a result, Earth was subjected to the repulsive electrical force of...

This colorful view from NASA's Cassini mission is the highest-resolution view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole known as "the hexagon." This movie, made from images obtained by Cassini's imaging cameras, is the first to show the hexagon in color filters, and the first movie to show a complete view from the north pole down to about 70 degrees north latitude. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University This colorful view from NASA's Cassini mission is the highest-resolution view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole known as "the hexagon." This movie, made from images...

Explanation: There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be at the right place and time to see it. The road, as pictured above, is actually the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy; the right place, in this case, is dark Laguna Cejar in Salar de Atacama of Northern Chile; and the right time was in early October, just after sunset. Many sky wonders were captured then, including the bright Moon, inside the Milky Way arch; Venus, just above the Moon; Saturn and Mercury, just below the Moon; the Large and...

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Janus and Epimetheus travel in nearly the same track, about 94,100 miles (151,500 km) out from Saturn. They occasionally pass each other, their gravity causing them to switch speeds and positions as they do; Janus goes faster and higher one time, slower and lower the next – but the two never come within more than about 6,200 miles of each other. The two moons switch positions roughly every four years. This scenario is referred to in astrophysics as a 1:1 resonance. Astronomers were initially confused when the moons were discovered in 1966 as it wasn’t known at the time that...

It is frustrating, at a time when other nations are in ascendancy in space, that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama seems committed to undermining the nation's own solar system exploration program. The Obama administration cut NASA's planetary-sciences budget by 20 percent in 2013. It has taken the National Research Council's (NRC) recommendations for prioritizing planetary investments in bad economic times and turned those recommendations upside down. The administration continues to favor large, directed projects at the expense of programs and missions that are openly competed.

In an end-of-year interview on Al-Nahar TV, Egyptian astrologer Sayyed Al-Shimi warned that whenever Saturn enters a fire sign, the Jews become stronger. Attributing various events, including the first World Zionist Congress, the Balfour Declaration, and the 1948, 1956, and 1967 wars, to the constellation of the stars, Al-Shimi warned that in December 2014, Saturn would enter Sagittarius again.Following are excerpts from the interview, which aired on Al-Nahar TV and was posted on the Internet on December 31, 2013: Sayyed Al-Shimi: Saturn will enter the fire sign of Sagittarius. My late father and I have had a long history with...

The extreme challenges and conditions faced by rovers during missions to explore other planets has inspired researchers and engineers to look into alternative, more suitable designs. After considering the complicated choreography of a regular landing – as we saw with the Mars Curiosity rover in August last year – as well as the challenging terrain a rover often faces once it reaches a planet’s surface, engineers at NASA have come up with an ultra-flexible squishable robot designed to effortlessly cope with any planetary surface it finds itself on. Although the so-called Super Ball Bot has been in development for...

PARIS (AFP) - Uranus has puzzled scientists ever since the probe Voyager 2 did a flyby in 1986 and found that its magnetic field appeared to break the planetary rulebook. The evidence from Earth, Jupiter and Saturn determined that a planet's magnetic field should be like that of a bar magnet, with a north and south pole that runs roughly along the sphere's rotational axis. But Uranus -- and Neptune, too, Voyager found -- are radically different. Their magnetic fields are tipped over (the north-to-south line lies midway to the equator or even closer) and there are two north and...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn's north pole. This is the first hexagon movie of its kind, using color filters, and the first to show a complete view of the top of Saturn down to about 70 degrees latitude. Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds (about 322 kilometers per hour) with a massive, rotating storm at the center. There is no weather feature exactly, consistently like this anywhere else in the solar system. "The...

A NASA probe has captured an amazing video of the huge and mysterious six-sided vortex spinning around Saturn's north pole. Scientists created the new video of Saturn's vortex from 128 images snapped by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in December 2012. It's the highest-resolution movie yet obtained of the giant hexagon, which is about 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) wide and has been swirling for at least 30 years, researchers said. "The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the...

Explanation: In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in giant planet's shadow earlier this year and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a unique and celebrated view. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, Saturn's expansive ring system appears as majestic as always even from this odd angle. Ring particles, many glowing only as irregular crescents, slightly scatter sunlight toward Cassini in this natural color image. Several moons and ring features are also discernible....

Explanation: This image of Saturn could not have been taken from Earth. No Earth based picture could possibly view the night side of Saturn and the corresponding shadow cast across Saturn's rings. Since Earth is much closer to the Sun than Saturn, only the day side of the ringed planet is visible from the Earth. In fact, this image mosaic was taken earlier this month by the robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. The beautiful rings of Saturn are seen in full expanse, while cloud details are visible including the polar hexagon surrounding the north pole, and an extended light-colored...

The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is launching its Fall 2009 Evening Lecture Series with talks on wandering solar system planets and searches for hazardous asteroids from Mount Lemmon... Planetary sciences professor Renu Malhotra will speak on "Migrating Planets" on Tuesday, Sept. 15. [whoops] Did the solar system always look the way it is now? New studies by Malhotra and others find that the outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- were more tightly clustered in the early solar system, then moved away from each other. Malhotra's models show that as the solar system evolved, Jupiter...

Explanation: This friendly photo collage is constructed from more than 1,400 images shared by denizens of planet Earth as part of the Cassini Mission's July 19th Wave at Saturn event. The base picture of Earth corresponds to the view from the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft on that date as its own cameras recorded images including planet Earth as a pale blue dot in the background. Of course, Saturn was 9.65 Astronomical Units away at the time, so it took light from all the waving Earth dwellers just over 80 minutes to travel there. Want to smile? Download and zoom in to...