magma ocean

Every Martian night, salt crystals on the planet's surface soak up moisture from the thin air, much like a sponge draws water from a damp cloth. By morning, a microscopic brine accumulates inside them, and during the day, as temperatures rise, that brine finds itself trapped in tiny cavities.

Deep inside a sub-Neptune, where pressures reach a hundred thousand bars and temperatures hit four thousand degrees, rock behaves like boiling soup. Heavy vapors of silicon and magnesium rise, cool, and fall back as a rain of solid particles.

The JWST space telescope aimed its lens at the scorching rocky world 55 Cancri e, and spotted a dense gas envelope. But the cooler TRAPPIST-1 b, which orbits a dim red dwarf, showed no envelope: just bare rock. The picture came out upside down: hot planets hold onto atmospheres, while cooler ones lose them.

On the surface of the Moon and asteroids, you can find pits smaller than a pinhead but with shiny, melted rims. Such marks are left by tiny meteorites, but the exact impact speed at which melting occurs remained unclear.

The birth of a moon is a cosmic car crash. Two young planets collide, and a cloud of scorching debris swirls around the surviving world. From this disk, like clay on a potter's wheel, a satellite gradually takes shape. That's probably how our Moon came to be.

Two neutron stars whirl in a close dance, each feeling the tidal field of its partner. It's like the Moon raising oceans on Earth, but here it's spacetime itself and the star's matter that deform. Astrophysicists call this tidal deformation — a measure of how much an object 'bends' under the gravitational pull of its companion.

The Moon is an airless sphere of dense rocky grit called regolith. When fast particles from space slam into it, muons are born in the soil — unstable relatives of electrons, but two hundred times heavier. Most fly downward and fade away in the depths. But those that pop upward into the vacuum can travel tens of kilometers before decaying.

Inside planets and stars, in rotating oceans of plasma, turbulent flows, Coriolis forces, and magnetic tension collide. The central question is how the energy of this chaos crystallizes into a stable magnetic framework that can last billions of years.

When a giant planet grows, it pulls in gas. Some of that gas swirls around it into a small disk — called a circumplanetary disk. It is in such disks that moons are thought to form. For the planet PDS 70 c, located 370 light-years away, such a disk was directly observed using the ALMA antenna array in the millimeter range.

The birth of planets resembles the workings of a cosmic forge. Rocky blocks collide and fuse together. A powerful impact strikes a spark — material heats to white-hot and glows like cooling metal. Computer simulations show: the flash is visible from days to years, peaking at a tenth of the sun's light.

Earth's magnetic field is like an invisible shield that protects us from cosmic radiation. But if you look closely at its long-term averaged pattern, you'll notice that this shield isn't perfectly smooth: it has its own "seams" and "patches." New research using computer simulations of the geodynamo shows that…

In the deep oceans of icy moons, water is not still. Warm plumes rise from the rocky seafloor, but the planet's rotation twists them into long, slanted rolls stretched along the rotation axis. Previously, this process could not be included in global models: it was too complex.

A scorching rocky planet is like a pot of boiling soup, except its lid is the atmosphere. Gases escape from the magma, wrap the world in a thick blanket, and in turn influence how quickly the celestial body cools. For GJ 1132 b, which orbits so close to its star that a year lasts just one and a half Earth days, this connection is especially important.

Young Earth was a boiling sphere of liquid rock, while Theia, which crashed into it, had had time to cool and solidify. It’s like dropping a chunk of cold butter into a pot of soup: the soup splashes out, but the butter barely moves. Similarly, Earth’s interior spewed into space, forming a cloud of cosmic dust and debris.

Previously, Uranus and Neptune were considered ice giants because of assumed thick layers of frozen water, methane, and ammonia. New calculations paint a different picture: deep inside them hides an ocean of hot magma, which under immense pressure has absorbed a colossal amount of hydrogen.

On the periphery of the Solar System lurk thousands of objects comparable in size to an exoplanet — a body of planetary mass not bound to our star. Their orbits are chaotic, and from time to time the trajectory of such a wanderer crosses Earth's path.

A planet the size of Neptune, but glowing white-hot. Beneath the clouds lies an ocean of magma capable of absorbing an entire hydrogen atmosphere. The new SEAMIST model is the first to trace how such dissolution changes a planet's fate from birth to old age. The big surprise is the mechanism of catastrophic boiling.

Putting together the Solar System is like crafting a high-end tasting menu: the recipe isn't always set in stone — sometimes the final ingredient is added while the dish is already cooking.

Eight hundred million years ago, in the main asteroid belt, a giant inkwell shattered. The parent body, over a hundred kilometers in diameter, made of primitive carbonaceous chondrites, suddenly broke apart near the J3:1 resonance with Jupiter.

A pot of boiling lava, sealed with a thick lid of gas. That's roughly what sub-Neptunes look like — planets that are common around other stars but absent in our own solar system. Beneath a thick hydrogen atmosphere sloshes a molten magma ocean.

If you don’t stir a layered cocktail, the heavy syrup sinks to the bottom. A young planet is much the same — a seething ocean of molten rock. As it cools, minerals crystallize: some, like iron, get heavy and sink, while others float. You’d think a dense layer would pile up at the core.

Globular clusters are dense 'balls' of hundreds of thousands of stars that orbit the center of the Milky Way. Some were born in our Galaxy, others were captured when the Milky Way swallowed dwarf satellite galaxies. They can be distinguished by chemical composition, but astronomers now have a new tool — dynamical age.

An old chest of family heirlooms opens, and inside lie jewels that were thought to be as old as great-grandmother. But suddenly it turns out: the gold was remelted, the stones were recut, and this happened much later than thought. A similar story happened to the oldest particles in meteorites — calcium-aluminum inclusions, or CAIs.

The Mpemba effect is surprising: hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold. Scientists built a simple model: a bead in a thick, honey-like medium, on a landscape with two dips and a wall at the edge. The bead moves viscously, unable to hop over the central bump.

Europa's surface is an icy armor continuously bombarded by charged particles from Jupiter's magnetosphere. Electrons slam into the ice's crystal lattice, lose energy, and kick off chemical reactions. Until now, there was no tool to show how deep such bombardment pierces the ice.

Mars is an icy desert with an average temperature of minus 60. To warm it without biology, scientists propose three approaches with a single idea: create a thick heat-trapping blanket. First, deploy transparent film-blankets over bases. They let sunlight in but keep heat from escaping, allowing us to harvest water from the soil and grow plants.

The James Webb Space Telescope is gazing more and more at exoplanets — worlds orbiting alien stars. Some of them are scorching rocky spheres, tidally locked with one side forever facing their star. There, rock melts into oceans of liquid lava. How does this lava move?

Rocky planets orbit dim red stars. Some of them have a year shorter than an Earth day: these worlds are called ultra-short-period planets. Their surfaces are scorching, and their skies are forever bathed in crimson light.

In the cold outer reaches of the Solar System, water is considered the main building material for ices. But some comets and distant icy bodies have an unusually high ratio of carbon monoxide (CO) to water, as if a scoop of ice cream suddenly had too much syrup. The authors of a new study set out to find where this imbalance comes from.

When a baker kneads dough, the grains of flour can tell you which mill they came from. It's the same with Earth: the composition of iron in its depths preserves a memory of where the pieces that assembled the planet were born.

At the dawn of Earth, about four billion years ago, the planet was a harsh place: a dim sun, frequent asteroid impacts, and air without oxygen. Under such conditions, the first steps of life seem almost impossible.

Ring-shaped reefs, atolls, are usually explained like this: corals grow along the edge of a volcanic island while the island slowly sinks. What's left is a hollow ring that can stretch for kilometers. But satellite images show similar rings around very small reefs where there are no volcanoes and no subsidence.

For exoplanets that always face their star with one side, the night side is doomed to eternal cold. But mountains can turn things around. Surface irregularities shake up the ocean of air, steering moisture flows across the day-night boundary. Once in the dark, water freezes into clouds, and clouds act like a blanket: they trap heat and keep the world from cooling down.

Beneath a thin layer of red dust on Mars lies water ice. Its presence was confirmed by the Phoenix lander and orbital instruments, but the mystery remained: why is the ice always just a few centimeters below the surface? The answer lies in the wobbles of Mars' axial tilt.

The young Solar System resembled a giant construction site: around the newborn Sun swirled a disk of gas and dust, and from this dust gradually assembled stones, boulders, and then planetary embryos — planetesimals. Today, their fragments fall to Earth as meteorites.

4 billion years ago, the young Earth was mercilessly bombarded by meteorites, leaving behind impact craters. Rains filled them with water, forming shallow ponds where lipid bubbles accumulated. These bubbles, like soap bubbles but with a double-layered lipid membrane (just like modern cells), formed spontaneously when water mixed with fat-like substances.

Life may be hiding in the oceans beneath the ice of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Its carbon-based building blocks perhaps baked before the moons were born — in a disk of gas and dust around a young Jupiter. This giant cosmic oven ran on slow frictional heating, not harsh ultraviolet light.

Deep beneath us, hundreds of kilometers down, lies a layer that can absorb water like a sponge. The minerals there, wadsleyite and ringwoodite, can hold up to 1–2% water by weight within their crystal lattices.

The Kepler telescope William Borucki's caught the faint twinkling of distant stars and discovered thousands of planets around other suns. Among them gapes a gap: almost no worlds sized between rocky balls and puffy water giants.

In the northern part of Arabia Terra, there are fields that look like a giant brain: ridges and troughs wind like convolutions. On Earth, similar patterns form in cold regions when water in the soil freezes and thaws, causing stones to sort themselves into stripes. But the Martian ridges are taller — averaging 3.29 meters — while Earth's mechanisms produce less than half a meter.