Main Menu

Drop Down MenusCSS Drop 

Down MenuPure CSS Dropdown Menu
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts

Wednesday 22 July 2015

NEW PLUTO PICTURES SHOW JELLY-BEAN MOON AND MOUNTAINS

nh-pluto-mountain-range.0.0
Newly-discovered frozen peaks on Pluto are taller than Ben Nevis while images of Nix reveal an unusual red spot
Newly-discovered frozen peaks on Pluto are taller than Ben Nevis while images of Nix reveal an unusual red spot
The latest pictures to be beamed back from the far reaches of the Solar System show a new mountain range on Pluto and the first close up images of two of the dwarf-planet’s smaller moons.
NASA’s New Horizons probe has discovered a new, mountain range on bright, heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Region.
These newly-discovered frozen peaks are estimated to be around 5,000ft high – about 600ft taller than Ben Nevis.
The Norgay Mountains discovered by New Horizons on July 15 are much taller, around 11,000ft, roughly the height of The Pyrenees.
The new range is just west of the region within Pluto’s heart called Sputnik Plain and some 68 miles northwest of Norgay Mountains..
Pluto2_3383483b
New Horizons has also picked up the first images large images of two of Pluto’s smaller moons.
Nix and Hydra – the second and third moons to be discovered – are approximately the same size, but their similarity ends there.
New Horizons’ first colour image of Nix shows a jelly bean shaped satellite which is 26 miles long and 22 miles wide.
Although the overall surface colour of Nix is neutral grey in the image, the newfound region has a distinct red tint. Hints of a bull’s-eye pattern lead scientists to speculate that the reddish region is a crater.
nh-nix-hydra-7-21_3383484b
Meanwhile, the sharpest image yet received from New Horizons of Pluto’s satellite Hydra shows that its irregular shape resembles the state of Michigan.
There appear to be at least two large craters, one of which is mostly in shadow. The upper portion looks darker than the rest of Hydra, suggesting a possible difference in surface composition.
Source: Telegraph

NEW NASA CAMERA PROVIDES AN ‘EPIC’ VIEW OF EARTH

2AB3935E00000578-0-image-m-3_1437412825315
This is what Earth looks like from a million miles away.
The stunning image, which focuses on America, was taken by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and is the satellite’s first view of the entire sunlit side of our planet.
It was presented to the White House today, prompting a tweet from President Barack Obama describing it as: ‘A beautiful reminder that we need to protect the only planet we have.’
The blue marble was captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (Epic) and created by combining three separate images to show the Earth in incredible detail.
The camera takes a series of 10 images using different narrowband filters – from ultraviolet to near infrared.
‘This first DSCOVR image of our planet demonstrates the unique and important benefits of Earth observation from space,’ said Nasa Administrator Charlie Bolden.
2AB3936D00000578-0-image-a-11_1437412880514
DSCOVR orbits the sun at a location called the Lagrange point 1, or L1, It’s from that unique vantage point that the Epic instrument is acquiring science quality images of the entire sunlit face of Earth. Data from Epic will be used to measure ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth

Dead galaxies in Coma Cluster may be packed with dark matter



New computer simulations show that these galaxies stopped star formation as early as 7 billion years ago but haven’t been ripped apart due to their dark matter.

Galaxies in a cluster roughly 300 million light-years from Earth could contain as much as 100 times more dark matter than visible matter, according to an Australian study.

The research used powerful computer simulations to study galaxies that have fallen into the Coma Cluster, one of the largest structures in the universe in which thousands of galaxies are bound together by gravity.

It found the galaxies could have fallen into the cluster as early as 7 billion years ago, which, if our current theories of galaxies evolution are correct, suggests they must have lots of dark matter protecting the visible matter from being ripped apart by the cluster.

Dark matter cannot be seen directly, but the mysterious substance is thought to make up about 84 percent of the matter in the universe.

Cameron Yozin from the University of Western Australia, who led the study, says the paper demonstrates for the first time that some galaxies that have fallen into the cluster could plausibly have as much as 100 times more dark matter than visible matter.

Yozin says the galaxies he studied in the Coma Cluster are about the same size as our Milky Way but contain only 1 percent of the stars.

He says the galaxies appear to have stopped making new stars when they first fell into the cluster between 7 and 10 billion years ago and have been dead ever since, leading astrophysicists to label them “failed” galaxies.

This end to star formation is known as “quenching.”

“Galaxies originally form when large clouds of hydrogen gas collapse and are converted to stars; if you remove that gas, the galaxy cannot grow further,” Yozin said.

“Falling into a cluster is one way in which this can happen. The immense gravitational force of the cluster pulls in the galaxy, but its gas is pushed out and essentially stolen by hot gas in the cluster itself.

“For the first time, my simulations have demonstrated that these galaxies could have been quenched by the cluster as early as 7 billion years ago.

“They have, however, avoided being ripped apart completely in this environment because they fell in with enough dark matter to protect their visible matter,” Yozin said.

Source : Astronomy Magzine

See it! Moon, Venus, Jupiter, comet

Source: Earth Sky

What a glorious western twilight sky on the nights of July 17 and 18, 2015! Waxing moon, brightest planets, and Comet C/2014 Q1 (PANSTARRS).


Venus (top left), Jupiter and the moon made a triangle as seen from some parts of the world on July 18, 2015. Aimilianos Gkekas submitted this photo to EarthSky. He caught the trio from a monastery known as Meteora – literally ‘suspended in the sky’ – in Thessaly, Greece.


Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Comet C/2014 Q1 (PANSTARRS) on July 18 by John Lafferty. 


 Venus, Jupiter and the moon setting on July 18 as seen from Porto, Portual. The star above the planets is Regulus in the constellation Leo. Photo submitted by João Pedro Bessa.


Moon and Venus on July 18, 2015 by John Ashley in Kila, Montana. If you view larger, you can see both worlds are crescents as seen from Earth now. Read why Venus appears as a crescent now.


Moon and Venus on July 18, 2015 by Billie C. Barb at Mutiny Bay, Freeland, Washington. 


Another view of the moon and crescent Venus on July 18, this one in daylight, from Spencer Mann in Davis, California.


Thursday 16 July 2015

After the Moon and Mars, ISRO eyes Venus for next exploration mission

earth-2
After the successful launch of its Mars orbiter, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is now viewing Venus as possibly the next planet it can study and explore.
“Besides the Mars-2 mission, we are looking at Venus and even an asteroid for exploration. A project has to be formulated for this before we chart out a proper roadmap for the explorations.  Venus is our neighbour and has many scientific challenges and aspects that need to be studied. Exploring an asteroid is also challenging task,” Dr Kiran Kumar, Isro chairman, told HT.
In 2014, India created history in space when its Mars orbiter slipped into the Red Planet’s orbit in its maiden attempt.
India became the first Asian country to reach Mars and the first in the world to enter the orbit of the planet in its first attempt.
isro-MOM-1200
Photo of Mars as taken by ISRO’s Mars Oriber Mission
Regarding the Saarc satellite, Dr Kumar said that it would be launched before December 2016. “The activities related to this project are in progress and we should begin building the satellite soon.”
Moving beyond satellite launches and planetary explorations, Isro is also aggressively working with many government departments on optimising the usage of space tools and data.
A national meet on space is likely to be held in Delhi next month, where ministries and departments of the government will give presentations on how they are using space tools in their workings. From civil aviation to railways, tribal affairs to health, postal to agriculture the number of government departments working with Isro has increased to more than 60 in the past few months.
Source : HindustanTimes

STUNNING FIRST HI-DEFINITION IMAGE OF PLUTO REVEALS HUGE MOUNTAINS


nh-plutosurface.0
The first ever high-resolution image of Pluto has been beamed back to Earth showing water ice and 11,000ft (3,350 metre) mountains. The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago – mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system. Nasa says they may still be in the process of building
Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered – unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.
‘We now have an isolated small planet that is showing activity after 4.5 billion years,’ said Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator. ‘It’s going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board.’
‘This is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system,’ added Jeff Moore of New Horizons’ Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI).
This is the first time astronomers have seen a world that is mostly composed of ice that is not orbiting a planet.
Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by the gravitational pull of a larger planetary body. Nasa says some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
‘This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,’ says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.
In a Wednesday press conference, scientists also revealed a high-resolution photo of Pluto’s moon Charon, which is covered in cliffs and ridges:
2A8FFC2200000578-3162894-image-m-5_1436991156346
They also released the first-ever photo of Pluto’s tiny moon Hydra, which appears to be covered in water ice:
nh-hydra_1.0
A new sneak-peak image of Hydra  is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 27 by 20 miles (43 by 33km). The surface shows differences in brightness, which suggests that Hydra’s outer layer is composed manly of water ice .
Read more: Daily Mail

Tuesday 14 July 2015

THE NEW HORIZONS PLUTO MISSION IS A BIG DEAL. HERE ARE SOME REASONS WHY


SOURCE : vox.com 
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about to show us an alien world for the first time. At precisely 7:49 am ET on Tuesday, the probe will become the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto.
New Horizons has been en route for nine years, traveling more than 3 billion miles. The flyby will be over in a matter of minutes, as the probe frantically takes hundreds of photos and collects data on Pluto’s atmosphere, geology, and moons. All this data will be enormously valuable to scientists as they seek to understand our solar system and how it formed billions of years ago.
More than anything, this mission is about broadening our horizons — taking in just a little bit more of the impossibly vast universe we live in.

1) We’ve never seen Pluto before

Pluto feels familiar. It’s easy to imagine the small, frigid rock, millions of miles from the sun and covered in ice.
But what you’re picturing in your head when you think about Pluto is probably an artist’s illustration. Until very recently, we didn’t even know exactly what color it was — and the best photos we had of Pluto looked like this:
pluto-hubble
New Horizons is going to change that in a very big way. Already, as it’s closed in on Pluto, it’s given us way better photos than ever before:
Screen_Shot_2015-07-13_at_2.11.02_PM.0
Pluto (right) and its moon Charon, as seen by New Horizons on July 11. (NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI)
The high-resolution photos to come will give us detailed topographical maps, just like those provided by the satellites that orbit Earth. They could reveal mountains, ice caps, volcanoes, or even an ocean of liquid water under the ice. “Who knows what kind of bizarre things we’ll find up close?” Stern said.

2) This mission will remind you how vast space really is

Pale-Blue-Dot
Earth, as seen by the Voyager spacecraft, from more than 4 billion miles away.
We spend our entire lives on the surface of Earth — so it’s hard to really grasp how far away Pluto truly is from us.
But as an analogy, think of Earth as a basketball. By comparison, Pluto would be a little larger than a golf ball. But if you wanted to keep the scale constant, you’d have to put that golf ball incredibly far away: 50 to 80 miles (depending on its location in orbit). This mission, like many activities in space, is a good reminder of how vast our corner of the universe is — and how absurdly tiny our entire earthly realm of experience is by comparison.
And it’s not just the size of space that boggles the mind. It’s also the timescale on which everything occurs. Pluto takes 248 Earth years to orbit the sun. To put it another way, the entirety of US history has occurred during a single Plutonian orbit.

3) We won’t get many more missions like this for a while

europa
There’s a mission to Europa planned, but it won’t reach the moon for a decade or more.
The past few decades have been filled with all sorts of fascinating missions to the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets of our solar system — uncrewed probes sent every few years, run by trained scientists, and supported by government funding.
But the sad truth is that this era is largely drawing to a close. As David W. Brown writes in an article on the dark future of American space exploration, “There is nothing budgeted in the pipeline to take its place. Yesterday invested in today. But we are not investing in tomorrow.”
This is the result of cutbacks to NASA’s planetary exploration budget. The OSIRIS-REx probe will launch next year, to travel to an asteroid and bring back a sample, but it won’t return until 2023. Meanwhile, a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa is in the works, but it likely won’t be launched until 2025 at the earliest, and wouldn’t reach Europa until the 2030s.
In other words: Enjoy this brief flyby. It’s going to be a while before any NASA probe visits a new world.

4)This is a staggering technological achievement

t’s hard to appreciate just how difficult it is to send a spacecraft to Pluto. But think of it this way: because it’s so incredibly far away, it took New Horizons nine years to cover the 3-billion-mile trip there — which means the craft is using decade-old technology, traveling a route that was calculated years ago.
Screen_Shot_2015-07-09_at_9.53.45_AM.0
New Horizons’ trajectory through the solar system.
Despite this, NASA engineers managed to get the tiny probe — about the size and shape of a grand piano — to an incredibly precise spot in space, using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot to accelerate it outward and a few thruster burns over the years to keep the probe on track.
Along the way, they had to worry about potentially damaging debris nearby Pluto — as well as a scary software glitch this past weekend, which was, thankfully, resolved. Now New Horizons is going to fly within 7,750 miles of Pluto, coming closer than its moons.
Because New Horizons is traveling at such a high speed (about 31,000 miles per hour) and can’t slow down, the flyby will be over in a matter of minutes — fording it to collect all its data in a tiny window of time.
And receiving all that data is another huge challenge. Because New Horizons is so far away, it takes about 4.5 hours for any data it sends back to reach Earth. And the signal is so faint that NASA has to use 200-foot-wide radio dishes (one each in Australia, California, and Spain) to pick it up. This means an extremely low rate of data transmission: about 1 kilobit per second, more than 50 times slower than a 56k modem from the ’90s. It takes more than 42 minutes for New Horizons to fully transmit an image that’s 1024 pixels wide.
If you haven’t been paying attention so far, now’s the time to start. This is a really big deal.

Friday 26 June 2015

NASA to Send Microsoft's Virtual Reality Headset to International Space Station



NASA is sending Microsoft's virtual reality headset to the International Space Station (ISS) to beam back to Earth what astronauts see in space.

NASA and Microsoft are teaming up to develop Sidekick, a new project using commercial technology to empower astronauts aboard the ISS.

Sidekick uses Microsoft HoloLens to provide virtual aid to astronauts working off the Earth.



A pair of the devices is scheduled to launch on SpaceX's seventh commercial resupply mission to the station on June 28.

"HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station," said Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS programme at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"This new technology could also empower future explorers requiring greater autonomy on the journey to Mars," said Mr Scimemi.

The goal of Sidekick is to enable station crews with assistance when and where they need it. This new capability could reduce crew training requirements and increase the efficiency at which astronauts can work in space.

"Sidekick is a prime example of an application for which we envisioned HoloLens being used - unlocking new potential for astronauts and giving us all a new perspective on what is possible with holographic computing," said Alex Kipman, technical fellow, Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft.

NASA and Microsoft engineers tested Project Sidekick and the Microsoft HoloLens aboard NASA's Weightless Wonder C9 jet to ensure they function as expected in free-fall in advance of their delivery to the microgravity environment of the space station.

Sidekick has two modes of operation. The first is "Remote Expert Mode," which uses Skype to allow a ground operator to see what a crew member sees, provide real-time guidance, and draw annotations into the crew member's environment to coach him or her through a task.

Until now, crew members have relied on written and voice instructions when performing complex repair tasks or experiments.

The second mode is "Procedure Mode," which augments standalone procedures with animated holographic illustrations displayed on top of the objects with which the crew is interacting.

This capability could lessen the amount of training that future crews will require and could be an invaluable resource for missions deep into our solar system, where communication delays complicate difficult operations.

Source : NDTV

Russia sets out Moon landing ambition, leaves Mars plans to Nasa

Russia, which put the first man into orbit in 1961, sees the Moon as a base for deeper space missions, Komarov said


Roscosmos plans to send 3 unmanned craft to the Moon before a Russian cosmonaut attempts a landing.
Russia’s state space agency chief is shooting for the Moon, three years after a predecessor warned that the country was on the verge of losing its competitiveness in the industry.
A manned lunar mission in 2029-2030 is Russia’s priority, while there are no “current stage” plans for a journey to Mars, Igor Komarov, head of the Federal Space Agency or Roscosmos, said in an interview in St. Petersburg last week.
“Nasa has Mars as the priority,” Komarov said. “We at this stage are making the Moon our priority. We can be good in rounding each other out and working jointly on this programme.”
Komarov’s ambition of landing a Russian on the Moon contrasts with former Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin’s warning in 2012 that the country’s space industry risked being uncompetitive within three or four years without “urgent measures.”
Russia, which put the first man into orbit in 1961, sees the Moon as a base for deeper space missions, Komarov said. It plans to send three unmanned craft to the Moon before a Russian cosmonaut attempts a landing, though Earth’s nearest neighbour shouldn’t become the object of a technological race between Russia and the US, he said.
Space partners
“We see it as a joint project and are ready to invite our partners for it to be done,” said Komarov, 51, who was appointed Roscosmos chief in January after it merged with United Rocket and Space Corp. that he headed. Previously in charge of Russia’s OAO AvtoVAZ carmaker for four years until 2013, he was given the task of overhauling the country’s space industry following a series of recent accidents during launches.
Amid worsening ties between Russia and the US over the conflict in Ukraine, space research could provide an example of cooperation that doesn’t depend on politics, Komarov said.
Sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union didn’t affect cooperation in running the International Space Station, he said. Increased equipment prices and delays in international projects show that Russia’s space industry hasn’t completely avoided the tensions and it’s now forced to seek greater cooperation with fellow members of the BRICS group that includes India, China, Brazil and South Africa, according to Komarov.
“Global projects are easier to implement together,” he said. “Less investment is needed, it benefits everyone.”
Humanity will always be united by the “eternal dream” of searching for civilizations on other planets, Komarov said.
“I do believe in the existence of an intellect different from ours,” he said.
Bloomberg

Thursday 25 June 2015

Dwarf planet Ceres reveals pyramid-shaped mystery



OK, this is just too much.
First, NASA's Dawn probe spotted curiously sparkly bright spots on the surface of Ceres, the dwarf planet that lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Beats us, the scientists said.
Now, cameras on the tractor-trailer-size spacecraft have captured a baffling structure rising 3 miles above the planet's cratered surface.
Conveniently, the thing looks an awful lot like a pyramid.
    "Intriguing," the NASA scientists said.


    To be fair, the agency offered no suggestion that the towering structure is an offering to some long-lost space emperor or home to our new alien overlords.
    And, to be even more fair, it's probably just a really tall mountain in a solar system filled with wondrous and strange natural phenomena.
    But the Dawn mission has done nothing but stoke imaginations since the discovery of mysterious bright spots on the surface of the dwarf planet in February and the beginning of the probe's orbit in March.
    Folks have claimed to have spotted giant alien motherships hovering over the planet, bat-winged spaceships parked on its surface and even evidence of alien cities.
    But the mystery only deepened with the most recent batch of images showing even more bright spots alongside the largest one, which NASA said looks to stretch some 6 miles.
    Many, of course, insist that the spots look for all the world like brightly lit cities twinkling on the shadowed surface of the distant dwarf planet.
    I knew it! There's gambling going on on Ceres! #aliens pic.twitter.com/QP6PB6JFho

    — Chris Reher (@Chris_Reher) June 13, 2015
    Of course, NASA hasn't traveled down that road. Scientists, they say, still don't know what the spots are. Maybe ice. Maybe salt.
    "But scientists are considering other options, too," NASA said coyly.
    But #itsaliens, right?
    Source : FirstPost

    Monday 30 March 2015

    What Is Dark Matter? Colliding Galaxy Clusters May Help Find Answer

    Dark matter is a hypothetical kind of matter that cannot be seen with telescopes but accounts for most of the matter in the universe.  Dark matter is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the universe. It has not been detected directly, making it one of the greatest mysteries in modern astrophysics.

    6a00d8341bf7f753ef01b7c702511b970b

    Hubble Image of Galactic Collision 

    A study of 72 large cluster collisions shows how dark matter in galaxy clusters behaves when they collide.

    andromeda_compressed

    Image Showing How two Galaxies Collides


    Astronomers have used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to find that dark matter interacts with itself less than previously thought. In an effort to learn more about dark matter, astronomers observed how galaxy clusters collide with each other -- an event that could hold clues about the mysterious invisible matter that makes up most of the mass of the universe.

    As part of a new study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, researchers used the Hubble telescope to map the distribution of stars and dark matter after a collision. They also used the Chandra observatory to detect the X-ray emission from colliding gas clouds.

    “Dark matter is an enigma we have long sought to unravel,” John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. “With the combined capabilities of these great observatories, both in extended mission, we are ever closer to understanding this cosmic phenomenon.”

    Featured Image -- 838

    Here are images of six different galaxy clusters taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (blue) and Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) in a study of how dark matter in clusters of galaxies behaves when the clusters collide. A total of 72 large cluster collisions were studied.  NASA and ESA

    According to scientists, galaxy clusters are made of three main components -- galaxies, gas clouds and dark matter. During collisions, the gas clouds bump into each other and gradually slow down. Galaxies, on the other hand, are much less affected by this process, and because of the huge gaps between the stars within them, galaxies do not slow each other down.

    “We know how gas and stars react to these cosmic crashes and where they emerge from the wreckage,” David Harvey of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and the study’s lead author, said in the statement. “Comparing how dark matter behaves can help us to narrow down what it actually is.”

    The researchers studied 72 large galaxy cluster collisions and found that, like galaxies, the dark matter continued straight through the collisions without slowing down much, meaning that dark matter do not interact with visible particles.

    “There are still several viable candidates for dark matter, so the game is not over. But we are getting nearer to an answer,” Harvey said.

    Source : IBT times

    Sunday 29 March 2015

    NASA is working with Russia on a new space station

    STS-116_spacewalk_1

    Astronauts Repairing Space Module

    Russia is teaming up with the USA to build ISS 2.0 once the current one's funding runs out in 2024 -- at least according to Russia Today and state news agency TASS. The country's space agency, Roscosmos threatened in February to use the Russian ISS modules as a platform for a new base of its own after 2024, but now it looks like there will be a followup collaboration.

    This time around, both parties are looking for participation from other countries, as well as private industry, and are apparently even eyeing a team-up for potential missions to Mars. Russian news outlets report the announcement came during a news conference Saturday following the launch of a year-long mission (video of the launch and subsequent ISS docking is embedded after the break) to the current International Space Station.

    NASA Statement -
    We are pleased Roscomos wants to continue full use of the International Space Station through 2024 -- a priority of ours -- and expressed interest in continuing international cooperation for human space exploration beyond that. The United States is planning to lead a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, and we have advanced that effort farther than at any point in NASA's history. We welcome international support for this ambitious undertaking. Today we remain focused on full use of our current science laboratory in orbit and research from the exciting one-year mission astronaut Scott Kelly just began, which will help prepare us for longer duration spaceflight.

    Chief Komarov, who was there for the US-Russia year-long ISS mission launch, reportedly said: "We have agreed that Roscosmos and NASA will be working together on the program of a future space station." In addition to building a new ISS, sources say the agency's partnership also entail working on a joint Mars mission. In the same event, NASA chief Charles Bolden is quoted saying: "Our area of cooperation will be Mars. We are discussing how best to use the resources, the finance, we are setting time frames and distributing efforts in order to avoid duplication."

    So far NASA hasn't announced or confirmed anything through its official channels. We've contacted the agency for comment and will update this post if we hear anything.

    Source : engadget.com

    Saturday 14 March 2015

    Huge Saltwater Ocean Found on Jupiter Moon Ganymede

    15-033i1

    Artistic Impression of Ganymede (Largest Moon in the Solar System)

    NASA has confirmed that Ganymede, one of the moons orbiting Jupiter, has a saltwater ocean lying below its icy exterior, making it a viable location for life to flourish.

    The scientists studying the planet and its outlier moons through the Hubble Telescope shared the news in a statement Thursday, saying that the ocean may bear more liquid than all the water on Earth combined.

    Ganymede is an anomaly among moons. It is the largest known moon in our solar system, and the only one that generates its own magnetic field. This attribute produces a phenomenon called aurorae—strips of radiant electrified gas that circle Ganymede’s poles. Because Ganymede is situated so close to its mother planet, any changes to Jupiter’s magnetic field directly affect that of its moon. So when Jupiter’s magnetic field shifts due to the planet’s rotation, Ganymede’s aurorae “rock” back and forth in a sort of cosmic mating dance.

    Observing the interplay between the planet and its moon, scientists surmised that an ocean works against Jupiter’s magnetic pull, causing Ganymede to rock less violently than they had anticipated. Once they had observed the planet with the Hubble Telescope, the researchers built computer models that supported speculation that Ganymede has a salty ocean.


    Researchers believe the subterranean ocean is 10 times as deep as Earth’s oceans.


    Since water is necessary to sustain life, it’s possible that these oceans may confirm the long-suspected presence of life on other planets, or on moons such as Titan and Enceladus.


    NASA has speculated since the 1970s that there was water on Ganymede. A 2002 Galileo mission confirmed that the moon had its own magnetic field, but the findings weren’t concrete enough to corroborate suspicion that Ganymede had a vast ocean beneath its outer crust—until now. In a statement, an assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, John Grunseld, said, “A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.”


    Source:Newsweek.com

    Saturday 7 March 2015

    Massive Exoplanet Evolved in Extreme 4-Star System

    According to a team of astronomers headed by Dr Lewis Roberts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, an extrasolar gas giant called 30 Arietis Bb (30 Ari Bb) is the second known example of a planet residing in a system with four stars.

    30-Ari-System-Four-Stars-and-a-Planet

    Artists conception of the 30 Ari star system. In the foreground is the primary star about which the massive exoplanet orbits. The primary's newly-found binary partner, a red dwarf, can be seen in the upper left and the secondary binary system can be seen to the upper right.

    While 30 Ari Bb was known before, it was thought to reside in a system of three stars, not four.

    The system, called 30 Ari, is located in the constellation Aries, approximately 136 light-years away.

    “Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars, triple stars, even quintuple star systems. It’s amazing the way nature puts these things together,” Dr Roberts said.

    The planet itself is enormous, with 9.88 times the mass of Jupiter. It orbits its primary star, 30 Ari B, every 335 days. This star has a relatively close partner star, which the planet does not orbit.

    The pair, in turn, is locked in a long-distance orbit with another pair of stars about 1,670 AU away.

    “It’s highly unlikely that this planet, or any moons that might circle it, could sustain life,” Dr Roberts and his colleagues said.

    The first four-star planet, Ph1b, was discovered in the star system Kepler-64 (KIC 4862625) in 2013 by astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission.

    The latest discovery, reported in the Astronomical Journal (arXiv.org preprint), suggests that exoplanets in quadruple star systems might be less rare than once thought.

    The similarity between Kepler-64 and 30 Ari is that both systems are quadruples consisting of two relatively close pairs that are widely separated.

    In fact, recent studies have shown that this type of star systems is itself more common than previously believed.

    “About 4% of Sun-like stars are in quadruple systems, which is up from previous estimates because observational techniques are steadily improving,” said team member Dr Andrei Tokovinin of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

    The scientists also reported on a triple-star planetary system, HD 2638, which hosts a so-called hot-Jupiter.

    This giant planet, named HD 2638b, orbits its primary star tightly, completing one lap every 3 days.

    Source : sci-news.com