Solar system

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the evidence that we are currently within a period of mass extinction, the kind of event that will show up in the fossil record a few million years from now as a clear discontinuity, a radical change in the diversity of life on the planet.

The first sighting of the light spectacle on another planet reveals properties of the mysterious Venusian clouds

The agency wants to send a robotic mission to Jupiter's enigmatic moon for less than $1 billion. Supporters say that one of the solar system’s most promising places to find life deserves a bigger investment
 

The solar system is full of bits and pieces, remnants of its heyday of activity 4.5 billion years ago. Planets are the most noticeable fossil leftovers, with giant Jupiter being two and a half times more massive that the sum total of the other major worlds.

Voyager 1's own record of the plasma vibrations in its vicinity conclusively show that it has reached the space between the stars. John Matson reports

                After many claims and statements over the past few years that Voyager 1, our most distant operating spacecraft, has ‘left the solar system’ (it hasn’t, as I explain here), it does now seem that as of August 2012 this extraordinary vehicle has entered the interstellar medium.

A telescopic survey looking for trans-Neptunian objects has chanced across a 37 mile wide chunk of rock and ice that instead moves around the sun in the same orbit as Uranus, just further ahead of the planet.

Although NASA’s planet hunting mission Kepler seems unlikely to return to a fully functioning state, after another reaction wheel failure, it has already yielded an extraordinary crop of new worlds.

Here are some things that will give whatever might be on your mind at the moment a little perspective. You’ve probably seen these images plastered all over the Internet already.

Back in February these pages discussed a newly discovered long-period comet, ISON (otherwise known as C/2012 s1), that is falling sunwards for what is probably its first passage through the inner solar system later this year – on a beautiful near parabolic orbit.

If I lived elsewhere in the multiverse, this is the news and cool space stuff I’d have been covering this week. Unfortunately, in this universe I didn’t have the time.