News (Page 824)

Jupiter’s Atmospheric Bands Go Surprisingly Deep For centuries, astronomers have been observing Jupiter swirling surface and been awed and mystified by its appearance. The mystery only deepened when, in 1995, the Galileo spacecraft reached Jupiter and began studying its atmosphere in depth. Since that time, astronomers have puzzled over its colored bands and wondered if they are just surface phenomenon, or something that goes deeper. Thanks to the Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting Jupiter since July of 2016, scientists are now much closer to answering that question. This past week, three new studies were published based on Juno data that presented new findings onRead More →

Air-Breathing Electric Thruster Could Keep Satellites in Low Earth Orbit for Years When it comes to the future of space exploration, one of the greatest challenges is coming up with engines that can maximize performance while also ensuring fuel efficiency. This will not only reduce the cost of individual missions, it will ensure that robotic spacecraft (and even crewed spacecraft) can operate for extended periods of time in space without having to refuel. In recent years, this challenge has led to some truly innovative concepts, one of which was recently build and tested for the very first time by an ESA team. This engine conceptRead More →

Gaze in Wonder at Jupiter’s Mysterious Geometric Polar Storms When the Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter in July 2016, it quickly got to work. Among the multitude of stunning images of the planet were our first ever images of Jupiter’s poles. And what we saw there was a huge surprise: geometric arrangements of cyclones in persistent patterns. Jupiter’s polar regions have always been a mystery to Earth-bound observers. The planet isn’t tilted much, which means the poles are always tantalizingly out of view. Other spacecraft visiting Jupiter have focused on the equatorial regions, but Juno’s circumpolar orbit is giving us good, close-up views of Jupiter’sRead More →

James Webb Telescope is Probably Going to be Delayed Again, and Could Exceed a Congress Spending Cap When the James Webb Space Telescope takes to space, some tremendous scientific discoveries are expected to result. As the spiritual and scientific successor to the Hubble, Spitzer, and Kepler Space Telescopes, this space observatory will use its advanced suite of infrared instruments to the look back at the early Universe, study the Solar System, and help characterize extra-solar planets. Unfortunately, the launch of this mission has been delayed several times now, with the launch date now set for some time in 2019. And based on the amount ofRead More →

Hubble Sees a Huge Dust Cloud Around a Newly Forming Star Younger stars have a cloud of dusty debris encircling them, called a circumstellar disk. This disk is material left over from the star’s formation, and it’s out of this material that planets form. But scientists using the Hubble have been studying an enormous dust structure some 150 billion miles across. Called an exo-ring, this newly imaged structure is much larger than a circumstellar disk, and the vast structure envelops the young star HR 4796A and its inner circumstellar disk. Discovering a dust structure around a young star is not new, and the star inRead More →

A New Planetary System Has Been Found with Three Super Earths As of March 1st, 2018, 3,741 exoplanets have been confirmed in 2,794 systems, with 622 systems having more than one planet. Most of the credit for these discoveries goes to the Kepler space telescope, which has discovered roughly 3500 planets and 4500 planetary candidates. In the wake of all these discoveries, the focus has shifted from pure discovery to research and characterization. In this respect, planets detected using the Transit Method are especially valuable since they allow for the study of these planets in detail. For example, a team of astronomers recently discovered threeRead More →

Rosetta’s 67P Is The Result Of A Collision Of Two Comets Ever since we’ve been able to get closer looks at comets in our Solar System, we’ve noticed something a little puzzling. Rather than being round, they’re mostly elongated or multi-lobed. This is certainly true of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P or Chury for short.) A new paper from an international team coordinated by Patrick Michel at France’s CNRS explains how they form this way. The European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft Rosetta visited 67P in 2014, end even placed its lander Philae on the surface. Rosetta spent 17 months orbiting 67P, and at its closest approach, RosettaRead More →

Catch Sight of Humanity Star… While You Can Humanity Star: shinny star-ball, or light pollution menace? Credit: Humanity Star. It’s a question I’ve gotten lots, now that the calendar has flipped over from February to March. When will we get our first good look at the Humanity Star reflector satellite? The Humanity Star satellite was a surprise payload object placed on the January 21st, 2018 inaugural orbital launch for Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. Said launch occurred at Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex-1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, placing Humanity Star in a 92 minute orbit inclined 83 degrees to the equator. Launch! Electron’s inauguralRead More →

Astronomers See A Dead Star Come Back To Life Thanks To A Donor Star It’s not exactly an organ donor, but a star in the direction of the hyper-populated core of the Milky Way donating some of its mass to a dormant neighbor. The result? The dormant neighbor sprung back to life with an X-ray burst captured by the ESA‘s INTEGRAL (INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) space observatory. “INTEGRAL caught a unique moment in the birth of a rare binary system” – Enrico Bozzo, University of Geneva. The neighbors have likely been paired together for billions of years, which is not in itself noteworthy: stars oftenRead More →

Scientists Find that Earth Bacteria Could Thrive on Enceladus For decades, ever since the Pioneer and Voyager missions passed through the outer Solar System, scientists have speculated that life might exist within icy bodies like Jupiter’s moon Europa. However, thanks the Cassini mission, scientists now believe that other moons in the outer Solar System – such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus – could possibly harbor life as well. For instance, Cassini observed plume activity coming from Enceladus’ southern polar region that indicated the presence of hydrothermal activity inside. What’s more, these plumes contained organic molecules and hydrated minerals, which are potential indications of life. To seeRead More →