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Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and by far the largest within the solar system. Jupiter is usually the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, the Moon and Venus); however at times Mars appears brighter than Jupiter.
Jupiter is 2.5 times more massive than all the other planets combined, so massive that its barycenter with the Sun actually lies above the Sun's surface (1.068 solar radii from the Sun's center). It is 318 times more massive than Earth, with a diameter 11 times that of Earth, and its volume is 1300 times as great as that of Earth. Quite naturally, Jupiter's gravitational influence has dominated the evolution of the solar system: some have described the solar system as consisting of the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted debris.
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Space & Time News
February 5, 2026
Feb. 2, 2026 NASA’s Perseverance rover has just made history by driving across Mars using routes planned by artificial intelligence instead of human operators. A vision-capable AI analyzed the same images and terrain data normally used by rover planners, ...
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Jan. 19, 2026 Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and ...
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Jan. 8, 2026 A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By electroplating thorium onto steel, they achieved the same results as years of work with delicate crystals — but far more ...
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Jan. 6, 2026 A distant pulsar’s radio signal flickers as it passes through space, much like stars twinkle in Earth’s atmosphere. By monitoring this effect for 10 months, researchers watched the pattern slowly evolve as gas, Earth, and the pulsar all moved. ...
Jan. 6, 2026 Mars looks familiar from afar, but surviving there means creating a protective oasis in a hostile world. Instead of shipping construction materials from Earth, researchers are exploring how to use Martian soil as the raw ingredient. Two tough ...
Jan. 2, 2026 A physicist has proposed a bold experiment that could allow gravitational waves to be manipulated using laser light. By transferring minute amounts of energy between light and gravity, the ...
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Dec. 25, 2025 Scientists are digging into the hidden makeup of carbon-rich asteroids to see whether they could one day fuel space exploration—or even be mined for valuable resources. By analyzing rare meteorites ...
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Feb. 3, 2026 Astronomers have produced the most detailed map yet of dark matter, revealing the invisible framework that shaped the Universe long before stars and galaxies formed. Using powerful new observations ...
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Feb. 2, 2026 NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 team has entered a carefully controlled two-week quarantine as the countdown begins for their journey to the International Space Station. The four astronauts—representing ...
Jan. 31, 2026 Jupiter’s swirling storms have concealed its true makeup for centuries, but a new model is finally peeling back the clouds. Researchers found the planet likely holds significantly more oxygen than ...
Jan. 31, 2026 A young star called V1298 Tau is giving astronomers a front-row seat to the birth of the galaxy’s most common planets. Four massive but extremely low-density worlds orbiting the star appear to be ...
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Jan. 28, 2026 For the first time, astronomers have captured radio signals from a rare exploding star, exposing what happened in the years leading up to its death. The radio waves reveal that the star violently ...
Jan. 27, 2026 Bright white rocks spotted by NASA’s Perseverance rover are rewriting what we thought we knew about ancient Mars. These aluminum-rich clays, called kaolinite, usually form on Earth only after ...
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