The location and topography of lunar crater Giordano Bruno. Left is a map of the lunar farside using the Lunar QuickMap. Right is the topographic map of GB crater from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) data. Credit: Nature Astronomy (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02258-z A small international team of planetary scientists has found evidence supporting the…
Category: Planets
New evidence found for Planet 9
A comparison of the orbital distributions from P9-inclusive (left) and P9-free (right) N−body simulations. Both panels depict the perihelion distance against the semi-major axis of orbital footprints of simulated TNOs with i lim = 24. Credit: arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2404.11594 A small team of planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Université Côte d’Azur…
The history of the young cold traps of the asteroid Ceres
Map of the north polar region of Ceres. The color areas are areas that are continuously shadowed over a Ceres year, and therefore very cold. The axis tilt (obliquity) of Ceres slowly changes over time and is currently 4 degrees, but ranged between 2 and 20 degrees over time. The color indicates the maximum obliquity…
Lunar landforms indicate geologically recent seismic activity on the moon
Global random spatial age distribution (0–250 million years) of 34 lunar lobate scarps in this study. Credit: Credit: Earth and Planetary Science Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2024.118636 The moon’s steadfast illumination of our night sky has been a source of wonder and inspiration for millennia. Since the first satellite images of its surface were taken in…
New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars
NASA’s Curiosity rover continues to search for signs that Mars’ Gale Crater conditions could support microbial life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS A research team using the ChemCam instrument onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in lakebed rocks within Gale Crater on Mars, which indicates that the sediments were formed in a river, delta, or…
Why is methane seeping on Mars? NASA scientists have new ideas
Filled with briny lakes, the Quisquiro salt flat in South America’s Altiplano region represents the kind of landscape that scientists think may have existed in Gale Crater on Mars, which NASA’s Curiosity Rover is exploring. Credit: Maksym Bocharov The most surprising revelation from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover—that methane is seeping from the surface of Gale…
New young and warm Jupiter-like exoplanet detected
NGTS monitoring plot showing average nightly fluxes for TOI-4862. Credit: Battley et al., 2024. An international team of astronomers reports the detection of a new young and warm exoplanet orbiting a distant star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-4862 b (or NGTS-30 b), is similar in size and mass to Jupiter. The finding was published…
Astronomers offer new model for formation of recently discovered 'free-floating' planets
Schematics of JuMBO production from stellar encounters. Left: A close stellar fly-by to a planetary system results in the ejection of two planets, which remain bound and form a floating planetary binary. Right: Two equal-mass, coplanar planets orbit a star of mass M1. An interloper star of mass M2 flies by with asymptotic velocity v∞…
NASA is seeking a faster, cheaper way to bring Mars samples to Earth
This photo provided by NASA shows the Perseverance Mars rover collecting a sample from a rock called “Bunsen Peak” using a coring bit on the end of its robotic arm on March 11, 2024. NASA has put the effort to bring the samples to Earth on hold until there is a faster, cheaper way. Credit:…
New analysis reveals the brutal history of the Winchcombe meteorite's journey through space
Representative μCT slices from chips of the Winchcombe meteorite and contoured orientation data on the long and short shape axes of chondrules plotted on a lower hemisphere stereographic projections and n denotes the number of chondrules measured for each plot. Credit: Meteoritics & Planetary Science (2024). DOI: 10.1111/maps.14164 Intensive new nano-analysis of the Winchcombe meteorite…