Space and astronomy news
[/caption] Planetary rings are more than just astronomical marvels — they’re also a sort of archive, chronicling histories of impacts for decades. A pair of studies were published online in Science today by two different teams that noticed odd characteristics in the rings of Saturn and Jupiter — and followed them to this promising conclusion. In …
Continue reading “New Studies: Planetary Rings Harbor Records of Past Smash-Ups”
[/caption] Mars is a small planet. In fact, for scientists who do solar system modeling, the planet is too small. “This is an outstanding problem in terrestrial planet formation,” said Dr. David Minton from the Southwest Research Institute. “Everyone who does simulations of how you form terrestrial planets always ends up with a Mars that …
Continue reading ““Marstinis” Could Help Explain Why the Red Planet is So Small”
[/caption] One of the fundamental problems in planetary science is trying to determine how planetary bodies in the inner solar system formed and evolved. A new computer model suggests that huge objects – some as big as large Kuiper Belt Objects like Pluto and Eris — likely pummeled the Earth, Moon and Mars during the …
Continue reading “Late, Big Bombardments Brought Heavy Metals to Earth”
[/caption] With the recent milestone of the discovery of the 500th extra solar planet the future of planetary astronomy is promising. As the number of known planets increases so does our knowledge. With the addition of observations of atmospheres of transiting planets, astronomers are gaining a fuller picture of how planets form and live. Thus …
At best, the few extrasolar planets we have imaged directly are just points of light. But what can that light tell us about the planet? Maybe more than we thought. As you probably know the, Deep Impact spacecraft flew by comet Hartley 2 today, taking images from only 700 km away. But maneuvering to meet …
Continue reading “Simple Colors Could Provide First Details of Alien Worlds”
[/caption] Ever since the announcement of the discovery of exoplanet Gliese 581g, there has been a buzz in the news, on websites, Twitter – pretty much everywhere, about the first potentially habitable extrasolar planet. But the past couple of days there has been a different sort of buzz about this distant world. Two stories have …
Continue reading “Buzz About Gliese 581g: Doubts of Its Existence; Aliens Signals Detected”
[/caption] Saturn’s rings have several gaps, most of which are caused by small moons shepherding ring debris into breaks in the rocky rings. But one gap may be caused by gravitational perturbations from Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, sending tsunami-like waves up to 3 kilometers (2 miles) high in the C ring. This causes one region …
Continue reading “Titan-ic Tsunami Causing Crack in Saturn’s C Ring”
[/caption] Wanna build celestial objects? I mean it sounds easy – you just start with a big cloud of dust and give it a nudge so that it starts to spin and accrete and you end up with a star with a few wisps of dust left in orbit that continue to accrete to form …
Continue reading “Astronomy Without A Telescope – A Snowball’s Chance”
[/caption] An enticing new extrasolar planet found using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii is just three times the mass of Earth and it orbits the parent star squarely in the middle of the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” a potential habitable region where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. If confirmed, this would be the …
Continue reading “New Earth-sized Exoplanet is in Star’s Habitable Zone”
[/caption] Venus is so hot, it’s cool! This very groovy 1960’s-looking image shows the temperature distribution within Venus and local mobilization at the surface, and is the result of new model of the atmosphere of Earth’s sister planet. The model reveals that the heat in the atmosphere induced from a strong greenhouse warming might actually …
Continue reading “Hot Atmosphere of Venus Might Cool the Interior”