Researchers from McGill University in Montreal have discovered a bacterium living in the frozen permafrost of the high Arctic. The permafrost bacterium, Planococcus halocryophilus strain Or1, grows and divides at -15°C and can even remain metabolically active at -25°C.

This bacteria is yielding clues about how extraterrestrial organisms might endure extreme conditions - as one of the things that makes it extremely hard for life to flourish in foreboding places like Mars and the moons of Saturn is the punishing cold. ...

At the very top of Venus’s mountains, below a thick layer of clouds, is snow. But not snow as we know it - with some surfaces reaching 480°C, Venus is way too hot for that. So what is this stuff? Researchers have figured out that Venus's heat is vaporising minerals called galena and bismuthinite, causing them to enter the atmosphere as a metallic mist before condensing into a shiny, metallic frost that rains down on the mountaintops.

Did you know that you could fit all the planets of the Solar System into the distance between the Earth and the Moon? But please don't - it would kill us all.

"George" was named by it's discoverer in honour of George III. It wasn't popular and Uranus, the father of Saturn in Roman mythology, was eventually settled upon.

The images, taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft from a distance of 18,000 kilometres give Pluto a "strangely Arctic look", NASA scientists said.

The Soviet-built space probe, Venera 3, was the first spacecraft to ever land on another planet back on March 1st, 1966, after being launched on November 16, 1965 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The mission of this spacecraft was to land on the Venusian surface. The entry body contained a radio communication system, scientific instruments, electrical power sources, and medallions bearing the State Coat of Arms of the U.S.S.R.

Unfortunately, the probe crash-landed on Venus, causing its communication systems to fail before it could return any information about the planet. The spacecraft impacted on the night side of Venus, near the terminator, around -20º to 20º N, 60º to 80º E.

The Venera program, however, would go on to successfully submit data f ...

Here's what Venus would look with water, and without its thick CO2 atmosphere

When we think of Venus, we envision a planet that'd make a great place for hell - fiery red, extremely hot, and toxic. However, a new study makes an argument that Venus may have once been able to support life, until a mysterious resurfacing event took all that away about 700 million years ago.

According to planetary scientist Michael Way from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Venus may have had a stable climate for billions of years.

"It is possible that the near-global resurfacing event is responsible for its transformation from an Earth-like climate to the hellish hot-house we see today."

The research – presented last week at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 201 ...