Tag Archive for 'Solar System'

Flaring, active regions of the Sun are highlighted in this image combining observations from several telescopes. High-energy X-rays from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) are shown in blue; low-energy X-rays from Japan’s Hinode spacecraft are green; and extreme ultraviolet light from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is yellow and red. All three telescopes captured their solar images around the same time on April 29, 2015. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / GSFC / JAXA.

Source of Sunquakes is Submerged beneath Solar Surface, Study Shows

Jan 5, 2021 by News Staff

Ultra-impulsive acoustic emission from a solar flare recently detected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) indicated submersion of its source...

Perspective view of chaotic terrain in Pyrrhae Regio, Mars. Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Mars Express Spots Chaotic Terrain near Valles Marineris

Dec 31, 2020 by News Staff

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has imaged a fascinating landscape near the major canyon system of Valles...

Hamilton et al. studied the composition of Almahata Sitta 202 to determine that it likely originated from a previously unknown parent asteroid. Image credit: Hamilton et al., doi: 10.1038/s41550-020-01274-z.

Almahata Sitta Meteorites Came from Ceres-Sized Asteroid, Study Shows

Dec 28, 2020 by News Staff

The parent body of the Almahata Sitta meteorites — space rocks that rained down on the Nubian Desert in Sudan in 2008 — is a 640 to 1,800 km-wide...

This image shows a suite of fluvial ridges on Mars (at –67.64 °E, 43.37 °S). Image credit: J. Dickson.

Planetary Researchers Create Map of Early Mars’ River Systems

Dec 24, 2020 by News Staff

Using data from the Context Camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, planetary researchers have generated an 8-trillion-pixel global map of...

This image, taken by the LASCO C2 camera on SOHO, shows comet C/2020 X3 in the bottom left-hand corner. Image credit: NASA / ESA / SOHO.

SOHO Observatory Spots Newly-Discovered Sungrazer Comet

Dec 22, 2020 by News Staff

C/2020 X3, spotted by the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), is part of the Kreutz family, a group of comets with related orbits that...

This image comprises data gathered by ESA’s Mars Express on November 8, 2020, during orbit 21,305. Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Mars Express Spots Festive Silhouettes near Martian South Pole

Dec 18, 2020 by News Staff

The wings of an angelic figure, complete with halo, can be seen sweeping up and off the top of the frame in a new image from ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft,...

This image, taken with the Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope, shows the near-Earth asteroid 1998 KY26. Image credit: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Subaru Telescope Captures Images of Near-Earth Asteroid 1998 KY26

Dec 18, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope have produced spectacular images of 1998 KY26, a future asteroid target of JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft. This...

Enceladus’ tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon’s icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon’s south pole and creating Saturn’s mysterious E-ring. Evidence for this has come from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. Pictured here, a high resolution image of Enceladus is shown from a close flyby. Tiger stripes are visible in false-color blue. Image credit: NASA / ESA / JPL / SSI / Cassini Imaging Team.

Enceladus’ Subsurface Ocean Has Various Energy Sources for Microbial Life, Study Suggests

Dec 17, 2020 by News Staff

In a study published this month in the journal Icarus, planetary researchers from the United States and Germany modeled chemical processes in the subsurface...

This Hubble image of the dynamic blue-green planet Neptune reveals a huge dark storm (top center) and the emergence of a smaller dark spot nearby (top right). The giant vortex, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, was traveling south toward certain doom by atmospheric forces at the equator when it suddenly made a U-turn and began drifting back northward. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) captured this visible-light image on January 7, 2020, the same time a slightly smaller dark spot mysteriously appeared nearby. That spot then vanished a few months later. The smaller feature may have been a piece of the giant storm that broke off as the larger vortex approached the equator. The large storm is the fourth transient dark spot Hubble has observed since 1993. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft first imaged two dark features in Neptune’s southern hemisphere in 1989 as Voyager flew by the distant planet. Those storms had disappeared by the time Hubble looked at Neptune in 1994. However, Hubble detected two new dark spots in the planet’s northern hemisphere in 1994 and 1996. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / M.H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / L.A. Sromovsky & P.M. Fry, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hubble Monitors Weird Dark Vortex on Neptune

Dec 16, 2020 by News Staff

In 2018, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope spotted a giant dark storm, which is 7,400 km (4,600 miles) across, in the northern hemisphere...

Ankylosaurus magniventris, a large armored dinosaur species, witnesses the impact of an asteroid, falling on the Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago. Image credit: Fabio Manucci.

Non-Marine Mass Extinctions Occur with Periodicity of 27.5 Million Years: Study

Dec 11, 2020 by News Staff

Non-marine animals (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have apparently experienced at least 10 distinct episodes of intensified extinctions over...

Rendering of Gale Lake some 3.5 billion years ago, when Mars was warmer and much wetter. Image credit: Evan Williams / NASA / Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HIRISE project.

Martian Brines May Not Be as Widespread as Previously Thought

Dec 11, 2020 by News Staff

In a new study published in the Planetary Science Journal, a team of U.S. scientists combined experimentally verified data on brine evaporation rates along...

A whimsical view of the planets of our Solar System and the missions sent from Earth to explore them. Image credit: Jenny Mottar / NASA.

Astronomers Discover New ‘Celestial Autobahn’ in Solar System

Dec 9, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers from Serbia and the United States has discovered a new superhighway network to travel through our Solar System much...

Jupiter and Saturn have been traveling across the sky together all year, but in December, get ready for them to really put on a show. Over the first three weeks of the month, watch each evening as the two planets get closer in the sky than they’ve appeared in two decades. Look for them low in the southwest in the hour after sunset, Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Jupiter and Saturn Will Form ‘Double Planet’ for First Time since Middle Ages

Dec 8, 2020 by News Staff

On December 21, 2020, the Solar System’s two gas giants will appear closer together in Earth’s night sky than they have been since 1226 CE. Jupiter...

A fragment of the Tagish Lake meteorite. Image credit: Mike Zolensky, NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Scientists Find Precursor of Prebiotic Chemistry in Three Meteorites

Dec 8, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has detected a polyheterocyclic organic molecule called hexamethylenetetramine in three carbonaceous meteorites: Murchison,...

Hayabusa-2’s container with material from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu and its parachute in South Australia. Image credit: JAXA.

Hayabusa-2 Returns Samples of Asteroid Ryugu to Earth

Dec 7, 2020 by News Staff

On December 6, 2020, JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft delivered a landing capsule with samples of material collected from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid...

This image of a sunspot was taken on January 28, 2020 by NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope’s Wave Front Correction context viewer. The image reveals striking details of the sunspot’s structure as seen at the Sun’s surface. The sunspot is sculpted by a convergence of intense magnetic fields and hot gas boiling up from below. This image uses a warm palette of red and orange, but the context viewer took this sunspot image at the wavelength of 530 nm -- in the greenish-yellow part of the visible spectrum. Image credit: NSO / AURA / NSF.

Inouye Solar Telescope Captures Its First Image of Sunspot

Dec 7, 2020 by News Staff

An image of a sunspot captured by NSF’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope clearly shows the potential of the telescope and its set of state-of-the-art...

Data from more than 1.8 billion stars have been used to create this map of the entire sky. It shows the total brightness and color of stars observed by ESA’s Gaia satellite and released as part of Gaia’s Early Data Release 3. Brighter regions represent denser concentrations of bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer and fainter stars are observed. The color of the image is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky. The bright horizontal structure that dominates the image is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is actually a flattened disk seen edge-on that contains most of the Galaxy’s stars. In the middle of the image, the Galactic center appears bright, and thronged with stars. Darker regions across the Galactic plane correspond to foreground clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which absorb the light of more distant stars. Many of these clouds conceal stellar nurseries where new generations of stars are currently being born. Dotted across the image are also many globular and open clusters, as well as entire galaxies beyond our own. The two bright objects in the lower right of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO / A. Moitinho.

ESA’s Gaia Mission Releases Data on More Than 1.8 Billion Stars

Dec 3, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers from the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium released today the most detailed ever catalogue of Milky Way stars. The new data set,...

The young Mars would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 m deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere, and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 km. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO / N. Risinger, skysurvey.org.

Study: Early Mars Likely Had Energy Source for Underground Life

Dec 3, 2020 by News Staff

According to a new study published in the journal Science Advances, the Martian subsurface would have been the most habitable region for simple life forms...

This illustration shows Jezero Crater -- the landing site of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover -- as it may have looked billions of years ago on Mars, when it was a lake. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Researchers Develop Hydrogen and Oxygen Harvesting System for Use on Mars

Dec 1, 2020 by News Staff

The active Martian water cycle, i.e., the presence of shallow water and soluble perchlorate salts in the Martian soil, enables the production of hydrogen...

This false-color image of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken by the Rosetta navigation camera on 15 June 2015 from a distance of 207 km from the comet center. Image credit: ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM / CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.

Solid Phosphorus and Fluorine Detected in Coma of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Nov 27, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Using the COmetary Secondary Ion Mass Analyser (COSIMA) instrument on board ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, researchers have detected phosphorus and fluorine...

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