NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this image of Enceladus on Nov. 30, 2010. The shadow of the body of Enceladus on the lower portions of the jets is clearly visible. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute A NASA study expands the search for life beyond our solar system by indicating that 17 exoplanets (worlds outside our solar system)…
Category: Planets
Potential signs of life on Mars might be easier to find than first thought
The experiment rose to the edge of space before plummeting back to Earth, simulating Mars’ atmosphere. Credit: Thales Alenia Space A school science experiment is answering questions that are out of this world. While there had been concerns that any evidence of organic matter on Mars might be obscured by the planet’s geology, new research…
Saturn's icy moon may hold the building blocks of life
This artistic rendering shows ice plumes being ejected from Enceladus at speeds of up to 800 miles/hour. Credit: NASA As astrophysics technology and research continue to advance, one question persists: is there life elsewhere in the universe? The Milky Way galaxy alone has hundreds of billions of celestial bodies, but scientists often look for three…
Global view of Io's volcanic activity suggests that tidal heating is concentrated within its upper mantle
Hot spot detections. The maximum, unsaturated 4.8 μm (M-band) spectral radiances from 266 hot spots identified in Juno JIRAM data obtained from March 2017 to July 2022, using data from orbits PJ5 to PJ43 grouped by order of magnitude. The larger the symbol, the greater the 4.8 μm spectral radiance. This is an equal-area Mollweide projection centered…
Astronomers discover two 'hot Jupiters' orbiting red-giant stars
Above, the phase-folded light curve of TOI-4377 b from TESS is shown, with the individual flux observations in blue and the larger white-filled points representing a 10-point temporal binning. The solid black line represents the best fit transit model to the data. Below, the residuals between the data and the transit model are shown, with…
Observations find evolving material, not rings, circling Centaur Chiron
The predicted shadow path for the 2018 November 28 UT Chiron occultation. The solid black lines indicate the northern, center, and southern extent of the shadow path with 3σ error bars as dashed lines. Chiron’s shadow was assumed to be 108 km in radius for this prediction. Credit: The Planetary Science Journal (2023). DOI: 10.3847/PSJ/ad0632…
Building blocks for life could have formed near new stars and planets
Credit: CC0 Public Domain While life on Earth is relatively new, geologically speaking, the ingredients that combined to form it might be much older than once thought. According to research published in ACS Central Science, the simplest amino acid, carbamic acid, could have formed alongside stars or planets within interstellar ices. The findings could be…
One of the largest magnetic storms in history quantified: Aurorae from the tropics to the polar regions
A Japanese auroral drawing showing an observation at Okazaki on 4 February 1872, as reproduced with courtesy of Shounji Temple (contrast enhanced). Credit: ©︎ Shounji Temple In early November of this year, aurora borealis were observed at surprisingly low latitudes, as far south as Italy and Texas. Such phenomena indicate the impacts of a solar…
Webb findings support long-proposed process of planet formation
This artist’s concept compares two types of typical, planet-forming disks around newborn, sun-like stars. On the left is a compact disk, and on the right is an extended disk with gaps. Scientists using Webb recently studied four protoplanetary disks—two compact and two extended. The researchers designed their observations to test whether compact planet-forming disks have…
A radically new view on dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way
Dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC Commonly thought to be long-lived satellites of our galaxy, a new study now finds indications that most dwarf galaxies might, in fact, be destroyed soon after their entry into the Galactic halo. Thanks to the latest catalog from ESA’s Gaia satellite, an international team has now demonstrated…