"Makemake is one of the largest and brightest icy worlds beyond Neptune, and its surface is dominated by frozen methane," ...

Pluto may have been demoted to non-planet status, but it still commands a court of five moons, as is fitting for the king of ...

Webb uncovers methane on Makemake, showing the icy dwarf planet is more active than once thought - just like Pluto.

The lead author, Sylvia Protopapa, a chief scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI), explained that methane dominates Makemake's frozen surface and is now also found in the gas phase above ...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered that a hazy sky over frozen Pluto is helping to cool the dwarf planet's atmosphere, while at the same time giving methane and other organic ...

A Southwest Research Institute-led team has reported the first detection of gas on the distant dwarf planet Makemake, using ...

The methane emission is explained by solar-excited fluorescence. Sunlight interacts with methane molecules, causing them to ...

A study of Pluto’s bright frosts suggests that the way the planet cools down is rapid and disorganised. The results were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress in Berlin. Pluto’s surface ...

Pluto is a reasonably difficult object to study, lying beyond the orbit of Neptune (for the majority of its orbit) in the Kuiper Belt. Beyond sending a probe to the planet (which NASA did in 2015) we ...

Pluto’s atmosphere, though tenuous compared to those of the terrestrial planets, exhibits a fascinating complexity driven by extreme temperatures and dynamic surface interactions. Predominantly ...

When Pluto passed in front of a star on the night of August 15, 2018, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of astronomers had deployed telescopes at numerous sites in the U.S. and Mexico. This was ...

Makemake is about 890 miles wide, roughly two-thirds the size of Pluto. Early observations indicated it had almost no atmosphere—essentially just a little air, if any. However, Webb's powerful ...