Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Io, the innermost giant moon of Jupiter, may not have a ...

"Tidal heating plays an important role in the heating and orbital evolution of celestial bodies," said Alex Hayes, professor of astronomy. "It provides the warmth necessary to form and sustain ...

Excess heat is flowing from the north pole of Enceladus, hinting at a careful energy balance deep that may have kept the subsurface ocean stable over geologically significant timescales, boosting its ...

Free-floating planets, or as they are more commonly known, rogue planets, wander interstellar space completely alone. Saying there might be a lot of them is a bit of an understatement. Recent ...

A moon can sit next door to another and still feel like a different world. Around Jupiter, that contrast shows up fast. Io ...

Saturn's innermost moon, which resembles the Death Star from Star Wars, may be a "stealth" ocean world, according to new research. Mimas, which is the smallest and closest to Saturn of the ringed ...

The Moon has long been the Earth's close companion, but researchers have struggled to understand exactly when the moon formed, because tiny crystals in the moon rocks brought home by astronauts ...

Artist's impression of what the Moon looked like during the tidal-heating event. There would have been intense volcanic activity everywhere. The early Earth would have loomed much larger in the sky ...

The once-exclusive club of Solar System objects that host oceans is getting increasingly crowded. On Wednesday, Nature released a paper providing evidence that Saturn’s moon Mimas has a subsurface ...

Io, one of Jupiter’s Galilean satellites, is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Images from spacecraft have shown molten lava erupting along walls that dam giant lava lakes and ...