Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution or the MAVEN mission discovered some incredible new pieces of information about Mars. These findings revealed that the Sun, in its devilish way, destroyed the atmosphere of Mars. Stripping away a heavenly environment where water flowed and life could thrive in. Furthermore, NASA learned that the once-thick atmosphere of Mars was blown away by the Sun’s solar winds between 4.2 billion and 3.7 billion years ago.   What’s terrifying is that Mars only retained 1% of its atmosphere as a result. Not only that but the rate at which Mars was losing its atmosphere: one quarter pound of atoms per second! That is the mass of a cheeseburger being stripped away by the solar winds every second. A tasty but frightening image. What about our very own Earth? Don’t we get hit by solar winds too? Well our Earth is shielded by such harmful...

Saturn and Jupiter are one of the largest gaseous planets in our solar system that hold a plethora of excitement and mystery. One of the mysteries is how these planets actually formed. You may be thinking to yourself, “Is that really a big mystery to us?” And the answer is yes. Let me tell you why.     The mystery starts with the widely accepted theory called core accretion model. This model states that a planet-sized core of rock and ice form first. Following that, an inflow of interstellar gas and dust latch on to the growing planet. At this part of the model is where it gets a little dicey, because you see the very first step of this process doesn’t match up with the following: Accumulating a massive atmosphere requires a solid core of 10x that of Earth. However, these objects must form in a few million years. Why does that matter? It matters because the...

In the last decade Pluto has gone through a lot of controversy around whether it’s a planet or not. However, controversy aside there are some really cool discoveries happening in the just the last month or so. We’re going to take a look at my favorite 5 things about Pluto that you may not know about. Please let me know in the comments below of a Pluto fact that you really found interesting or fascinating.   1. Pluto’s color was not what we expected Pluto’s color is a lot different than some of us had imagined. I thought it might have been blue because it’s considered an icy dwarf planet. However, that is actually not the case at all here. First off Pluto has two contrasting colors – beige / dark orange and to me what looks like a grey or grey with a tinge of blue. Actually, the internet had represented Pluto in either red or blue. So I’d...