Things always get interesting when the American Astronomical Society meets, which it is now doing in Denver, in sessions that will run until June 7. There should be no shortage of topics emerging from the meeting, but the first that caught my eye was a different approach to the putative world some are calling Planet Nine. Teasing out the existence of a planet at the outer edges of the Solar System has involved looking at gravitational interactions among objects that we do know about, and extrapolating the presence of a far more massive body. But the methodology may be flawed, if new work from Ann-Marie Madigan and colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder is correct. At a press briefing at the AAS meeting, the team presented its view that objects like Sedna, an outlier that takes more than 11,000 years to complete an orbit around the Sun, should be considered in relation to other so-called 'detached bodies.' Almost 13 billion kilometers out, Sedna is one of a collection of...

I'm looking forward to the buildup as New Horizons gets ever closer to Kuiper Belt Object MU69 and whatever surprises will attend the flyby. But the ongoing operations of the Dawn spacecraft orbiting Ceres equally command the attention. The image below is one of the first images Dawn has returned in more than a year, a stark view of surface features taken on May 16 of this year. The altitude here is 440 kilometers -- for scale, the large crater near the horizon is about 35 kilometers wide. The foreground crater is about 120 kilometers from that crater, within a jumbled landscape suggestive of ancient terrain underlying the more recent impact. Image: On the way to its lowest-ever and final orbit, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is observing Ceres and returning new compositional data (infrared spectra) and images of the dwarf planet's surface, such as this dramatic image of Ceres' limb. Dawn has returned many limb images of Ceres in the course of its mission. These images offer complementary...

The ongoing work of mining New Horizons' abundant data from the outer system continues at a brisk pace. But missions occur in context, and we also have discoveries made at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe to bring to bear. The question that occupies Christopher Glein and Hunter Waite (both at SwRI) is how to explain the chemistry New Horizons found at Pluto and what it can tell us about Pluto's formation. At the heart of their new paper in Icarus is the question of Pluto's molecular nitrogen (N2), which plays a role on that world similar to methane on Titan, water on Earth and CO2 on Mars. All are volatiles, meaning they can move between gaseous and condensed forms at the temperature of the planet in question. We've learned that solid N2 is the most abundant surface ice visible to spectroscopy on Pluto, as witness the spectacular example of Sputnik Planitia. Image: NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured this image of Sputnik Planitia...

Once again we take advantage of older databanks to tease out new information. Europa is the case in point this morning, with Galileo data -- magnetic field and plasma wave observations from 1997 -- being brought in as evidence for a water vapor plume rising from the surface. The Galileo flyby took the craft closer than 400 kilometers, where a brief spike in plasma density was detected along with a concurrent decrease in magnetic field magnitude and a bend in the direction of the field. The data are consistent with a plume interacting with Jupiter’s plasma outflow, and support earlier Hubble indications of possible plumes on the moon. We have no firm measurement of the thickness of Europa’s ice, but if we are to get to that fascinating ocean now known to exist below the surface, we have to contend with penetrating it. Plumes from the interior would be helpful indeed, as Enceladus showed us at Saturn. Flying a spacecraft through a plume lets us measure its ingredients and sample the...

Our current depictions of conditions in the early Solar System involve titanic change, with the giant planets moving inward and then outward, creating gravitational havoc and scattering inner system objects in all directions. Such disruptions doubtless happen in other infant planetary systems and because of them, we can predict a large population of so-called ‘rogue’ planets that move through the galaxy dissociated from any star. Closer to home, there may well be small objects kicked into extreme orbits that bear evidence of these migrations. The ‘grand tack’ hypothesis sees Jupiter forming at around 3.5 AU, well in from its current 5.2 AU orbital position, with migration all the way in to 1.5 AU before a reversal of course and movement outward to its current position. Imagine Jupiter plowing through the asteroid belt -- twice -- and the chaos of its passage, producing a wide scattering in asteroid orbital inclinations and eccentricities. The ‘Nice model’ likewise involves gas giant...