STUNNING FIRST HI-DEFINITION IMAGE OF PLUTO REVEALS HUGE MOUNTAINS

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:

They also released the first-ever photo of Pluto’s tiny moon Hydra, which appears to be covered in water ice:

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

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

NASA rocket to click 1,500 images of Sun in 5 minutes

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This image provided by NASA shows the sun emitting a significant X3.2-class flare erupting from the lower half of the sun, peaking at 5:40 p.m. EDT on Oct. 24, 2014. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly and captured images of the event.

A sounding rocket fitted with technology to gather 1,500 images of the Sun in flat five minutes is set for launch on Monday.

Capturing five images per second, the Rapid Acquisition Imaging Spectrograph Experiment (RAISE) mission will focus in on the split-second changes that occur near active regions on the Sun.

These are areas of intense and complex magnetic fields that can give birth to giant eruptions on the Sun that shoot energy and particles out in all directions, the U.S. space agency said in a statement.

“Even on a five-minute flight, there are niche areas of science we can focus on well. There are areas of the Sun that need to be examined with the high-cadence observations we can provide,” said Don Hassler, solar scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

RAISE will create a kind of data product called a spectrogram which separates the light from the sun into different wavelengths.

“The Sun has been extremely active recently, producing several X-class flares in the past few weeks. The team will aim their instrument at one of these active regions to try to understand better the dynamics that cause these regions to erupt,” Mr. Hassler explained.

The team hopes to see how heat and energy move through such active regions, which, in turn, helps scientist understand what creates the regions and perhaps even what catalyses the sun’s eruptions.

RAISE’s launch time is planned for 2.07 p.m. (EST) from the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico.