Tag Archive for Solar System

Possible scenarios of terrestrial planet formation: in the classic Wetherill-type model of oligarchic growth, the terrestrial planets formed by mutual collisions among Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos after the gas disk dissipated and accreted only a small fraction of CC planetesimals, which were scattered inward during Jupiter’s growth and/or putative migration; alternatively, the terrestrial planets may have formed within the lifetime of the gas disk by efficiently accreting ‘pebbles’ from the outer Solar System, which drift sunward through the disk due to gas drag; the two models differ in the amount of outer solar system material accreted by the terrestrial planets, which may be quantified using nucleosynthetic isotope anomalies. Image credit: Burkhardt et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj7601.

Earth and Other Terrestrial Planets Formed from Inner Solar System Material, Study Suggests

Dec 28, 2021 by News Staff

Two fundamentally different processes of rocky planet formation exist, but it is unclear which one built the Earth and other terrestrial solar system planets....

Trace Gas Orbiter Finds Water Ice in Martian Polar Crater

Dec 27, 2021 by News Staff

ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter has returned a stunning image of a 4-km- (2.5-mile) wide crater located in Vastitas Borealis, the largest lowland region of Mars. The...

The James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on December 25, 2021, on its exciting mission to unlock the secrets of the Universe. Image credit: ESA / CNES / Arianespace.

Webb Launches to Study Universe in Infrared

Dec 26, 2021 by News Staff

The James Webb Space Telescope, an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), launched at 7:20 a.m. EST (13:20 CET)...

This image, captured by the SoloHI instrument onboard the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter, shows the comet Leonard. Image credit: ESA / NASA / NRL / SoloHI.

NASA’s and ESA’s Sun-Studying Missions Observe Comet Leonard

Dec 22, 2021 by News Staff

When C/2021 A1 (Leonard), a recently-discovered long-period comet about 1 km wide, makes its closest pass of the Sun on January 3, 2022, it will be a journey...

An artist’s conception of the aerial biosphere in the cloud layers of Venus. In this picture, hypothetical microbial life in the clouds of Venus resides inside protective cloud particles and is carried by winds around the planet. Image credit: J. Petkowska.

Clouds of Venus May Be More Habitable than Previously Thought

Dec 21, 2021 by News Staff

Possible lifeforms in the Venusian clouds could be setting off a cascade of chemical reactions that is making the environment much more habitable, according...

A carbonate-rich grain in the sample of material from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu. Image credit: Pilorget et al., doi: 10.1038/s41550-021-01549-z.

Hayabusa-2 Sample Reveals New Information about Asteroid Ryugu

Dec 21, 2021 by News Staff

An analysis of the Hayabusa-2 sample of material returned to Earth from the carbon-rich, diamond-shaped, near-Earth asteroid Ryugu shows that the material...

Mars; the center of the scene shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system. Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter Finds Water in Martian Canyon System

Dec 17, 2021 by News Staff

Planetary researchers using the Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument onboard ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) have found evidence...

The Mastcam-Z instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover took this image of Ingenuity on December 1, 2021, when the rotorcraft was about 295 m (970 feet) away. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS.

Ingenuity Helicopter Completes Its Seventeenth Flight on Mars

Dec 16, 2021 by News Staff

On December 5, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully flew to a new destination located very close to its original airfield, Wright Brothers...

Sputnik Planum basin: this scene, which is about 250 miles (400 km) across, uses data from New Horizons’ Ralph/MVIC instrument. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

Planetary Scientists Solve Mystery behind Mysterious Polygonal Structures on Pluto

Dec 15, 2021 by News Staff

University of Exeter’s Dr. Adrien Morison and colleagues have shown how vast ice forms have been shaped in Sputnik Planitia, a nitrogen-ice-filled basin...

Parker Solar Probe has flown through the solar corona and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Parker Solar Probe Enters Magnetized Atmosphere of the Sun

Dec 15, 2021 by News Staff

The high temperatures and strong magnetic fields of the Sun’s upper atmosphere — the corona — form streams of the solar wind that expand...

Coadded images of comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (C/2014 UN271) from 2018 and 2020, showing coma with a sunward asymmetry; coadded images from several Kuiper Belt objects and asteroids show examples of moving objects of similar brightness that are known to have no coma. Image credit: Farnham et al., doi: 10.3847/PSJ/ac323d.

Study: Giant Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is Among Solar System’s Most Distant Active Comets

Dec 1, 2021 by News Staff

Comet C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein, the largest comet ever discovered, was already exhibiting coma at heliocentric distances 23.8 and 21.2 AU,...

Daly et al. used atom probe tomography to directly observe an average ~1 mol% enrichment in water and hydroxyls in the solar-wind-irradiated rim of an olivine grain from the S-type asteroid Itokawa. Image credit: Curtin University.

Part of Earth’s Water Came from the Sun, New Study Suggests

Nov 29, 2021 by News Staff

The solar wind, comprised of solar particles largely made of hydrogen ions, created water on the surface of dust grains carried on asteroids that smashed...

Curiosity used its navigation cameras to capture panoramas of this scene at two times of day. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Curiosity Team Releases Stunning Panorama of Martian Landscape

Nov 26, 2021 by News Staff

Members of NASA’s Curiosity rover mission team have combined two versions of the black-and-white images of Martian mountains from different times of...

NASA Successfully Launches DART Mission to Test Asteroid Deflection

Nov 25, 2021 by News Staff

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission launched November 24, 2021 at 1:21 a.m. EST on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex...

This artist’s impression shows NASA’s InSight lander in Homestead Hollow, a small impact crater; the r SEIS seismometer is the light-colored hemisphere on the ground in front of the lander; the ground beneath it consists of a sandy regolith layer on top of alternate layers of sediments (yellow-orange colors) and basaltic rocks, i.e. former lava flows (brown colors). Image credit: Géraldine Zenhäusern / ETH Zürich.

Mars Has Multi-Layered Subsurface, New Study Says

Nov 24, 2021 by News Staff

Using seismic data collected by the SEIS (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure) instrument aboard NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic...

This artist’s illustration shows NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in the outer Solar System. In the background lies the Sun and a glowing band representing Zodiacal Light, caused by sunlight reflecting off of dust. Image credit: Joe Olmsted / STScI.

New Horizons Detects Galactic Lyman-alpha Emissions

Nov 23, 2021 by News Staff

Hydrogen is the most abundant element. When a neutral hydrogen atom gets blasted with energy, its electron can be boosted to a larger orbit with a higher...

Organic and inorganic biomorphs (small abiotic structures that bear a morphological resemblance to living or fossil microbes): (a) asteroidal trichites radiating from central magnetite grains in a natural volcanic glass; (b) organic microspheres obtained from RNA and quartz mixtures under diagenetic conditions; (c) amphiphilic spherical and tube-like vesicles formed by mixed fatty acids and 1-alkanols (C10-C15) in 10 mM CaCl2; (d) coacervate microdroplets prepared in water by mixing PDDA with ATP; (e, f ) chain-forming and twinning proteinoid microspheres obtained by heating mixtures of amino acids; (g, h) apatite particles formed by double diffusion in gelatin mimicking dividing cells and raised polygonal features in embryos; (i) rod-shaped silica particles formed on the walls of basalt fractures injected with supercritical CO2; (j) cryogenic opal filaments and sheets formed in rapidly freezing silica-rich fluids; (k) cryogenic carbonate segmented filaments obtained by freezing of silica-rich alkaline brines; (l) rod-shaped apatite particles forming within organic films in sediments; (m) fluoroapatite particle precipitated in the presence of citrate, mimicking dividing coccoid cells. Image credit: McMahon & Cosmidis, doi: 10.1144/jgs2021-050.

Martian Rocks May Contain Numerous Types of False Biosignatures, Astrobiologists Say

Nov 22, 2021 by News Staff

In a new paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society, University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sean McMahon and University of Oxford’s Dr. Julie...

Hubble’s photo of Jupiter displays the ever-changing landscape of its turbulent atmosphere. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Amy Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Michael H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / Joseph DePasquale, STScI.

Hubble Observes Solar System’s Giant Planets

Nov 19, 2021 by News Staff

Hubble’s snapshots of the outer Solar System’s planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — reveal both extreme and subtle changes...

Could Be Fragment of the Moon

Earth’s Quasi-Satellite Kamooalewa Could Be Fragment of the Moon

Nov 12, 2021 by Natali Anderson

Using the Large Binocular Telescope and the Lowell Discovery Telescope, astronomers have conducted a comprehensive physical characterization of the near-Earth...

(A) location map for glass localities in Chile: (1) southwest of La Calera; (2) near the town of Pica; (3) Puquio de Núñez; (4) Quebrada de Chipana; and (5) Quebrada Guatacondo. (B) concentration of glassy slabs (dark masses) at the Chipana locality. Largest example in this view is 0.4 m across. Image credit: Schultz et al., doi: 10.1130/G49426.1.

Massive Comet Exploded over Atacama Desert 12,000 Years Ago, Study Suggests

Nov 8, 2021 by News Staff

According to a study published in the journal Geology, samples of glassy slabs found in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, contain tiny fragments with...

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