Want to navigate the solar system without having to buy a spacecraft? Jon Nguyen demos NASA JPL's "Eyes on the Solar System" -- free-to-use software for exploring the planets, moons, asteroids, and spacecraft that rotate around our sun in real-time.

Every star we see in the sky has at least one planet orbiting it, says astronomer Sara Seager. So what do we know about these exoplanets, and how can we find out more? Seager introduces her favorite set of exoplanets and shows new technology that can help collect information about them -- and even help us look for exoplanets with life.

Deep in our solar system, a new era of exploration is unfolding. Beneath the thick ice of Europa; in the vapor plumes on Enceladus; and within the methane lakes of Titan, scientists are hunting for extraterrestrial life. These moons are 'ocean worlds'— they contain liquid oceans, which can support the formation of life. Does life exist on ocean ...

Physicist Freeman Dyson suggests that we start looking for life on the moons of Jupiter and out past Neptune, in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. He talks about what such life would be like -- and how we might find it.

Could the strange orbits of small, distant objects in our solar system lead us to a big discovery? Planetary astronomer Mike Brown proposes the existence of a new, giant planet lurking in the far reaches of our solar system -- and shows us how traces of its presence might already be staring us in the face.

In 2009, researchers ran a simple experiment. They took everything we know about our solar system and calculated where every planet would be up to 5 billion years in the future. They ran over 2,000 simulations, and the astonishing variety in results revealed that our solar system may be much less stable than it seems. Fabio Pacucci explores the...

Carrie Nugent is part of a team that uses NASA's NEOWISE telescope to search the skies for and catalog asteroids.

Is there life beyond Earth? Join NASA's director of planetary science James Green for a survey of the places in our solar system that are most likely to harbor alien life.

David Baron writes about science in books, magazines, newspapers and for public radio. He has formerly served as science correspondent for NPR and as chair in astrobiology at the Library of Congress.

Could we exit our solar system, and enter another? Astrophysicist Philip Lubin discusses the awesome potential of using lasers to propel small spacecraft, enabling humanity's first interstellar missions. Learn how this transformative technology could help us reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our own -- and fundamentally alter our under...

Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, talks about his life as an inventor, starting with his high-school company selling solar energy plans and kits. Learn here about a groundbreaking system for solar cells -- and some questions we haven't yet solved.

As of 1989, mankind had successfully sent craft to every known planet in the solar system except one: Pluto. Located in an mysterious region called the Kuiper Belt, Pluto is a scientific goldmine, and could hold clues to the formation of our solar system. Alan Stern explains how NASA's New Horizons mission is going to allow us to see Pluto for t...

Fascinating talks that seek to unravel some of the most fundamental, yet unexplainable parts of the cosmos.

It's been a long road to the discovery that Earth is not the center of the Solar System, the Milky Way, or the universe; great thinkers from Aristotle to Bruno have grappled with it for millennia. But if we aren't at the center of the universe, what is? Marjee Chmiel and Trevor Owens discuss where we stand in the (very) big scheme of things. [Di...

What are the planets outside our solar system like? Astrophysicist and TED Fellow Jessie Christiansen has helped find thousands of them (and counting), and the variety is more wonderful and wild than you might imagine. She shares details on the trends emerging from the data -- including the intriguing possibility of "super-Earths" -- and what th...

Is Earth really the only life-sustaining planet? These speakers think there might just be something or someone else out there -- and urge us to keep looking for it.

On April 8, 2024, the moon’s shadow raced from Mexico to Canada — and Texas to Maine across the United States — in what some consider to be the most awe-inspiring spectacle in all of nature: a total solar eclipse. Umbraphile David Baron chases these rare events across the globe, and in this ode to the bliss of seeing the solar corona, he explain...

For those times when living a life far beyond our planet looks a little too appealing.

SpaceX's Starship launch vehicle has the potential to explore the solar system in a bold, new -- and supersized -- way. Planetary scientist Jennifer Heldmann talks about how reusable, large-scale spacecraft like Starship could help humanity achieve its next galactic leaps and usher in a new era of space exploration, from investigating the solar ...

Space physicist Miho Janvier studies solar storms: giant clouds of particles that escape from the Sun and can disrupt life on Earth (while also producing amazing auroras). How do you study the atmosphere on the Sun, which burns at temperatures of up to around 10 million degrees Kelvin? With math! Join the TED Fellow as she shares her work trying...

We're in the dawn of a new space revolution, says engineer Peter Beck: the revolution of the small. In a talk packed with insights into the state of the space industry, Beck shares his work building rockets capable of delivering small payloads to space rapidly and reliably -- helping us search for extraterrestrial life, learn more about the sola...

NASA's Dragonfly -- a robotic rotorcraft-lander that's designed to hop across the surface of an extraterrestrial body -- is set to voyage deep into the solar system to explore Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in 2026. Planetary scientist Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle shares how studying this mysterious moon that's thought to resemble the early Earth coul...

When humanity first landed on the moon in 1969, the typeface Futura was right there with them. In this fascinating history of typography, designer Douglas Thomas shares Futura's role in launching the Apollo 11 spacecraft -- and how it became one of the most used fonts in the world.

Suppose you placed a camera at a fixed position, took a picture of the sky at the same time every day for an entire year, and overlaid all of the photos on top of each other. What would the sun look like in that combined image? A stationary dot? A circular path? Neither. Oddly enough, it makes a ‘figure 8’ pattern, known as the Sun’s analemma. G...

Since the 1950s, governments, companies, and researchers have been planting flags among the stars. But while it might seem like there's plenty of room in space, some pieces of celestial real estate are more valuable than others. As far as human space exploration is concerned, Lagrange points may be the most important places in our solar system. ...

From its life-sustaining energy to its explosive geomagnetic storms, the Sun has many mysteries, says astrophysicist Nour E. Rawafi. He sheds light on NASA's latest endeavor to better understand our fiery neighbor and its impact on the future of society: sending the cutting-edge Parker Solar Probe deep into the Sun's atmosphere in humanity's clo...

Water covers over 70% of the Earth, cycling from the oceans and rivers to the clouds and back again. It even makes up about 60% of our bodies. But in the rest of the solar system, liquid water is almost impossible to find. So how did our planet end up with so much of this substance? And where did it come from? Zachary Metz outlines the ancient o...

Modern life runs on wireless technology. What if the energy powering our devices could also be transmitted without wires? Electrical engineer Ali Hajimiri explains the principles behind wireless energy transfer and shares his far-out vision for launching flexible solar panels into space in order to collect sunlight, convert it to electrical powe...

Jennifer Heldmann spearheads robotic and human exploration of the solar system, with an eye to answering the central question: "Are we alone?"

Consider the spot where you're sitting. Travel backwards in time and it might've been submerged at the bottom of a shallow sea, buried under miles of rock or floating through a molten landscape. But go back about 4.6 billion years, and you'd be in the middle of an enormous cloud of dust and gas orbiting a newborn star. What exactly is this cosmi...