Space and astronomy news
NASA’s MESSENGER made its closest approach to Venus today, coming within 2,990 kilometers (1,860 miles) of its surface. The spacecraft used this close encounter with Venus’ gravity well to alter its trajectory as it travels towards its final destination: Mercury. This won’t be its final encounter with our twin planet, though. MESSENGER will meet up …
Continue reading “MESSENGER Heads Past Venus, Next Stop: Venus”
When a star flared briefly, astronomers knew it was because a dimmer star had passed directly in front, acting as a lens with its gravity to focus light. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the star. This was important, because the brief microlensing event also turned up the fact that this lensing star has a planet. Astronomers …
Spirit and Opportunity have the Red Planet all to themselves for now, but ESA is planning to send a rover of its own to crawl the surface of Mars. The ExoMars rover is a wheeled robotic rover with a similar look to the NASA rovers, but it will have different science objectives and enhanced capabilities. …
Even though our Solar System’s gas giants vary widely in size and mass, they do have something in common. Each planet is roughly 10,000 times more massive than the combined mass of all their moons. During planetary formation, rocky moons grew out of the solid material surrounding each planet. As these moons grew larger, leftover …
Continue reading “Gas Giants Gobbled Up Most of Their Moons”
An illustration of the interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a strange hot spot at its southern pole; a region that should be one of its coldest places. Scientists think that warm material inside the moon created an instability. The moon eventually rolled over, repositioning the …
An artist’s impression of a planetary system around HD 69830. Image credit: ESO. Click to enlarge Astronomers have discovered a nearby star that’s home to three Neptune-sized planets; no super-Jupiters here. The star, HD 69830, is located 41 light-years away in the constellation of Puppis. With magnitude 5.95, it’s just possible to see with the …
Jupiter’s icy moon Callisto. Image credit: NASA Click to enlarge As scientists learn more about our Solar System, they’ve found water ice in some unusual situations. One of the most intriguing of these environments is on icy moons, like Jupiter’s Europa, and Uranus’ Triton. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have recreated this kind …
Continue reading “Researchers mimic high-pressure form of ice found in giant icy moons”
For many years astronomers have known that massive, bright stars are usually found to be in multiple star systems. But a recent study by Charles Lada of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggests that most stars are actually all alone. A new study on low-mass stars – such as red dwarfs – has found that these stars rarely occur in multiples and that they are more abundant than high-mass stars, such as the Sun. Since planets form more easily around single stars, they could be more common than previously thought.
Even through life has flourished on Earth for billions of years, it doesn’t seem to make much of an impact on our planet’s landscapes. A team of scientists from UC Berkeley did an extensive survey of landscapes across the planet, and couldn’t find any place that was obviously modified by lifeforms; from large grazing animals to microscopic bacteria. The only effect seems to be that lifeforms will tend to round off sharp hills. So landscapes once covered with life on Mars might have a higher chance of being smoother and less jagged.
A planet forming disk located about 375 light-years from Earth has been found to contain some of the building blocks of life: acetylene and hydrogen cyanide. The chemicals were discovered around “IRS 46” using NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope. When mixed with water in a laboratory, these chemicals create a soup of organic compounds, including amino acids and a DNA base called adenine.