The Gravity Assist Podcast is hosted by NASA's Director of Planetary Science, Jim Green, who each week talks to some of the greatest planetary scientists on the planet, giving a guided tour through ...

For decades, Uranus and Neptune have been filed neatly into the “ice giant” drawer, shorthand for worlds built mostly from ...

The gravity of a planet, its star, and the centrifugal force associated with the planetary orbit nearly balance in five regions near the planet’s path where an asteroid (or spacecraft) could orbit ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

You probably already know that gravity can greatly influence cosmic objects as they make their way through space. We see this constantly in how the Sun's gravity causes planets to orbit it. And even ...

Because the solar system's contents formed from a disk around the sun, we would expect the orbits of everything orbiting the sun to keep relatively close to the plane of that disk. However, some don’t ...

Inscrutable ice giants Neptune and Uranus have only a thin rind of windy weather over their fluid contents, a team of planetary scientists say. The research published in the journal Nature relies on ...

Inscrutable ice giants Neptune and Uranus have only a thin rind of windy weather over their fluid contents, a team of planetary scientists say. The research published in the journal Nature relies on ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. He contributed this article to ...

Astronomers obsessed with solving the mysteries of dark matter or dark energy should remember: To make a great discovery, sometimes you need to know what you’re looking for. Take Michel Lalande. He ...

Neptune, the farthest known planet in our solar system, is 30 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. It is orbited by 14 moons, the largest of which is Triton. In Greek mythology Triton was a ...

FINALLY, a plausible explanation for how Neptune captured its errant moon Triton. It seems that Triton was wandering through space locked in the gravitational embrace of a companion when the pair ...