Planets, Jupiter | featured news

A British astrobiology conference has revived a years-old debate over the best place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system: Mars, or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? "For reasons I don't really understand, the wider solar system and the potential for life there has not been high priority," The Telegraph quoted Robert Pappalardo, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as saying on BBC Radio 4.

There’s an orphan planet roaming our galactic neighborhood. It’s a globe of gas about the size of Jupiter, astronomers say. And it’s out there by its lonesome, untethered to any star, drifting about 100 light-years from Earth. (In astronomical terms, that’s close.)

A pair of Earth-size worlds orbiting a dying star may be the fractured remnants of a single Jupiter-like gas giant, a new study says.

For explorers searching for life beyond Earth, the siren song of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, trills sweetly. “Europa has the best chance of having life there today,” said Britney Schmidt, who studies the moon at the University of Texas at Austin. Astrobiologists think so because NASA’s Galileo probe found strong evidence for a deep, briny ocean covering the entire moon deep under the icy surface.

NASA is on the verge of launching a new solar-powered spacecraft all the way to Jupiter....

NASA's upcoming mission to Jupiter can't get much greener than this: a solar-powered, windmill-shaped spacecraft....

The Milky Way galaxy may be filled with millions upon millions of Jupiter-sized planets that have escaped their solar systems and are wandering freely in space, researchers said Wednesday in a finding that seems certain to make astronomers rethink their ideas about planetary formation.

After Venus sets, it's Jupiter that takes over for the rest of the night, outshining everything in the night sky but the moon.

Scientists don't know quite why, but one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has disappeared -- again.

Images taken by NASA early Monday show a scar in the atmosphere near the south pole of the gas giant.