Future Timeline

A small team of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d'Azur and Southwest Research Institute reports possible new evidence of Planet 9. They have published their paper on the arXiv preprint server, and it has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In 2015, a pair of astronomers at Caltech found several objects bunched together beyond Neptune's orbit, near the edge of the solar system. The bunching, they theorized, was due to the pull of gravity from an unknown planet—one that later came to be called Planet 9.

NASA's Juno spacecraft was dispatched on a mission in 2011 to study the planet Jupiter. It has beamed back some truly stunning images and valuable data on the solar system's largest planet. While in the neighborhood, Juno also took a closer look at some of the larger Jovian moons. The mission's most recent triumph is a close-up view of the volcanic moon Io, depicting lakes of lava as smooth as glass.

Technically, the images you've seen around the internet are not real photos of the surface, but they're based on data from the probe's recent flybys of Io. These artist impressions of the moon's lava lakes came from data Juno acquired on its recent low-altitude passes in December 2023 and February 2024. The probe passed within 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the surface during those flybys.

Images from the JunoCam visible-light camera aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft supports the theory that the icy crust at the north and south poles of Jupiter's moon Europa is not where it used to be. Another high-resolution picture of the icy moon, by the spacecraft's Stellar Reference Unit (SRU), reveals signs of possible plume activity and an area of ice shell disruption where brine may have recently bubbled to the surface.

The JunoCam results recently appeared in the Planetary Science Journal and the SRU results in the journal JGR Planets.

On Sept. 29, 2022, Juno made its closest flyby of Europa, coming within 220 miles (355 kilometers) of the moon's frozen surface. The four pictures taken by JunoCam and one by the SRU are the first high-resolution images of Europa since Galileo's last flyby in 2000.