Space and astronomy news
For all of Earth’s geological diversity and its long history, the planet has never had ice volcanoes. But Pluto has. And that cryovolcanism has shaped some of the ice dwarf’s surface features.
The resulting structures are unique in the Solar System.
Continue reading “Pluto’s Surface was Shaped by Ice Volcanoes”
After New Horizons made its close flyby of Pluto in July of 2015, scientists were astounded at the incredible closeup views of Pluto’s surface. One of the most intriguing and mysterious features was a bright plain inside the prominent heart-shaped feature on Pluto, called “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) named after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.
The region is composed of a broken surface of irregularly-shaped segments that appear to be geologically young because no impact craters are part of the terrain.
Continue reading “Now We Know Why Pluto has These Strange Features on its Surface”
The New Horizons spacecraft has been speeding away from Earth since it launched in 2006. Scientists using the Alice UV imaging spectrograph on board New Horizons, have been patiently but sporadically gathering data during those 15 years, but also waiting to get far enough away from the Sun to make a specific measurement: the brightness of the Lyman-alpha background of the Milky Way. Until now, this had never been measured accurately.
Continue reading “Once New Horizons was out Beyond Pluto, it Could Finally Measure the Brightness of the Milky Way”
May the 4th be With You!
Blasting out of Mos Eisley Space Port, the Millennium Falcon carries our adventurers off Tatooine bringing Luke Skywalker across the threshold into space. With Imperial Star Destroyers closing, Luke bemoans Han Solo’s delay in jumping to Hyperspace. It takes time to make these calculations through the Falcon’s “Navicomputer.” Han explains that otherwise they could “fly right through a star” or “bounce too close to a supernova.” (probably the same effect of each – also are supernovas bouncy?)
Celestial calculations are needed to figure out where you’re going. In Star Wars these are done by ship computers, or later by trusty astromech droids like R2-D2. But, for the first time, simulations have been conducted of an uncrewed ship’s ability to autonavigate through interstellar space. While not at Hyperspace speeds, the simulations do account for velocities at up to half the speed of light. Created by Coryn A.L. Bailer-Jones of the Max Plank Institute for Astronomy, these simulations may be our first step to creating our own “Navicomputers” (or R2-D2s if they have a personality).
As the New Horizons spacecraft hurtles out towards interstellar space, it has now reached an historical milestone. On April 17, 2021, New Horizons passed 50 astronomical units, or 50 times Earth’s distance from the Sun. It is just the 5th spacecraft to reach that distance, joining the Voyagers 1 and 2 and the Pioneers 10 and 11.
Continue reading “New Horizons is Now 50 Astronomical Units Away From the Sun”
Just how dark is the universe, anyway? It’s a pretty hard thing to measure when we’re sitting this close to the sun. But NASA’s New Horizons probe is so far away that the images it takes of the distant universe are able to deliver the most accurate measurement ever of the universe’s diffuse background light.
Continue reading “Away From the Light Pollution of the Inner Solar System, New Horizons was Able to see how Dark the Universe Really is”
In July of 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe made history when it became the first mission ever to conduct a close flyby of Pluto. This was followed by the spacecraft making the first-ever encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) – known as Arrokoth (aka. 2014 MU69) – on Dec.31st, 2018. In addition, its unique position in the outer Solar System has allowed astronomers to conduct rare and lucrative science operations.
This has included parallax measurements of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, the two closest stars to the Solar System. In addition, a team of astronomers led by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) used archival data from the probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to conduct measurements of the Cosmic Optical Background (COB).
Continue reading “New Horizons Saw the Universe With Even Less Light Pollution than Hubble’s View”
We can thank NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft for opening our eyes up to Pluto’s complexity. On July 14th, 2015, the spacecraft came within 12,500 km (7,800 mi) of the dwarf planet. During the flyby, New Horizons was able to characterize Pluto’s atmosphere and its surface.
Among the things New Horizons saw was a region of snowcapped mountains.
Continue reading “Pluto has Snowcapped Mountains, But Why?”
In July of 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made history when it became the first robotic explorer to conduct a flyby of Pluto. This was followed by another first, when the NASA mission conducted the first flyby of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) on December 31st, 2018 – which has since been named Arrokoth. Now, on the edge of the Solar System, New Horizons is still yielding some groundbreaking views of the cosmos.
For example, we here on Earth are used to thinking that the positions of the stars are “fixed”. In a sense, they are, since their positions and motions are relatively uniform when seen from our perspective. But a recent experiment conducted by the New Horizons team shows how familiar stars like Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 (two of the closest stars in our neighbors) look different when viewed from the edge of the Solar System.
Continue reading “New Horizons is so Far From Earth That the Positions of the Stars Look a Little Different From its Perspective”
When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, studying the atmosphere was a key scientific objective. Most of what we know about the ice dwarf came from that flyby. That happened in July 2015, but it took over 15 months to send all the data home, and it’s taking even longer to analyze it.
Continue reading “Astronomers Continue to Analyze Pluto’s Atmosphere”