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2010-04-28T12:51:00.001+08:00

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Blushing Pluto? Dwarf planet takes on a ruddier hue: NASA

2010-02-05T11:01:00.001+08:00

Pluto, the dwarf planet on the outer edge of our solar system, has a dramatically ruddier hue than it did just a few years ago, NASA scientists said Thursday, after examining photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

They said the distant orb appears mottled and molasses-colored in recent pictures, with a markedly redder tone that most likely is the result of surface ice melting on Pluto's sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole.

The remarkable color shift, which apparently took place between 2000 and 2002, confirms that Pluto is a dynamic world undergoing dramatic atmospheric changes and not simply a ball of ice and rock, according to scientists at the US space agency.

Full story...

Source: Yahoo!/AFP
Image credit: NASA/Yahoo!/AFP

Hubble telescope shows earliest photo of universe

2010-01-06T09:59:00.001+08:00

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe - just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.

Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.

These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.

Full story...

Source: Yahoo! News/AP
Image credit: NASA

Nasa's Kepler planet-hunter detects five worlds

2010-01-06T09:52:00.001+08:00

Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope has detected its first five exoplanets, or planets beyond our Solar System. The observatory, which was launched last year to find other Earths, made the discoveries in its first few weeks of science operations.

Although the new worlds are all bigger than our Neptune, the US space agency says the haul shows the telescope is working well and is very sensitive. The exoplanets have been given the names Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b.

They were announced at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC. The planets range in size from an object that has a radius four times that of Earth, to worlds much bigger than even our Jupiter. And they all circle very close to their parent stars, following orbits that range from about 3.2 to 4.9 days.

This proximity and the fact that the host stars are themselves much hotter than our Sun means Kepler's new exoplanets experience an intense roasting.

Full story...

Source: BBC Science News
Image credit: NASA/BBC

'Significant' amount of water found on Moon

2009-11-14T10:31:00.002+08:00

A camera on the probe shows the ejecta plume about 20 seconds after impact

Nasa's experiment last month to find water on the Moon was a major success, US scientists have announced. The space agency smashed a rocket and a probe into a large crater at the lunar south pole, hoping to kick up ice. Scientists who have studied the data now say instruments trained on the impact plume saw copious quantities of water-ice and water vapour. One researcher described this as the equivalent of "a dozen two-gallon buckets" of water. The near-infrared spectrometer on the LCROSS probe that followed the rocket into the crater detected water-ice and water vapour. The ultraviolet-visible spectrometer provided additional confirmation by identifying the hydroxyl (OH) molecule, which arises when water is broken apart in sunlight.

Full story...

Source: BBC Science News
Image credit: JPL NASA/BBC

An exoplanet with an extremely tilted orbit raises interest

2009-11-13T10:51:00.002+08:00

Two teams of astronomers have found a planet outside the solar system that might be orbiting backwards compared to its star’s rotation, a discovery that could shed light on how unique the relatively perfect alignment of our solar system is compared to that of other planetary systems.

By measuring the rotation of the parent star of HAT-P-7b, a planet discovered in 2008, the two teams, including one led by MIT assistant professor of physics Joshua Winn and the other by Norio Narita at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, found that the orbit is tilted by at least 86 degrees with respect to the star’s equator. The drastic misalignment of the exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, suggests that it is either rotating over both poles of its star or actually rotating backwards, a phenomenon that does not occur in our solar system and that could help explain why life thrives here.

Full story...

Source: MIT News
Image credit: Simon Albrecht/MIT

Spitzer Observes a Chaotic Planetary System

2009-11-05T10:51:00.002+08:00

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this infrared image of a giant halo of very fine dust around the young star HR 8799.

Before our planets found their way to the stable orbits they circle in today, they wiggled and jostled about like unsettled children. Now, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found a young star with evidence for the same kind of orbital hyperactivity. Young planets circling the star are thought to be disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.

The star, called HR 8799, was in the news last November 2008, for being one of the first of two stars with imaged planets. Ground-based telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, both in Hawaii, took images of three planets orbiting in the far reaches of the system, all three being roughly 10 times the mass of Jupiter. Another imaged planet was also announced at the same time around the star Fomalhaut, as seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Both HR 8799 and Fomalhaut are younger and more massive than our sun.

Full story...

Source: NASA News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Frost-Covered Phoenix Lander Seen in Winter Images

2009-11-05T10:42:00.002+08:00

Winter images of NASA's Phoenix Lander showing the lander shrouded in dry-ice frost on Mars have been captured with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The HiRISE camera team at the University of Arizona, Tucson, captured one image of the Phoenix lander on July 30, 2009, and the other on Aug. 22, 2009. That's when the sun began peeking over the horizon of the northern polar plains during winter, the imaging team said. The first day of spring in the northern hemisphere began Oct. 26.

Full story...

Source: NASA News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA probe detects changing season on Mercury

2009-11-04T13:48:00.004+08:00

A NASA spacecraft has spotted what appears to be changing seasons on Mercury and found much more iron on the surface of the small, rocky planet than previously thought.

The MESSENGER probe made the observations during its third flyby of Mercury on Sept. 29, when it took a host of measurements and images of the innermost planet's surface and atmosphere. Only about half of the planned measurements were made because of a data glitch that affected the spacecraft during the flyby.

The $446 million probe's third flyby brought it within 142 miles (228 km) of Mercury's surface to cover more uncharted terrain, leaving 98 percent of the planet now mapped. The flyby was also a gravity assist meant to guide the spacecraft into orbit around the planet in 2011.

Full story...

Source: Space.com
Image credit: NASA

Stellar blast from 13.1 billions light year detected

2009-10-29T10:48:00.002+08:00

The redness of the afterglow is indicative of the event's distance

Astronomers have confirmed that an exploding star spotted by Nasa's Swift satellite is the most distant cosmic object to be detected by telescopes. In the journal Nature, two teams of astronomers report their observations of a gamma-ray burst from a star that died 13.1 billion light-years away.

The massive star died about 630 million years after the Big Bang. UK astronomer Nial Tanvir described the observation as "a step back in cosmic time". Professor Tanvir led an international team studying the afterglow of the explosion, using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii.

The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is an example of one of the most violent explosions in the Universe. It is thought to have been associated with the cataclysmic death of a massive star - triggered by the centre of the star collapsing to form a "stellar-sized" black hole.

Full story...

Source: BBC Science
Image credit: AJ Levan/NR Tanvir/BBC

Most distant galaxy cluster discovered

2009-10-23T13:51:00.002+08:00

The youngest and most distant galaxy cluster yet has been discovered by scientists 10.2 billion light years away, a billion further than the previous record. The JKCS041 galaxy cluster, discovered by combining x-ray data from NASA with optical and infrared telescopes, is viewed as it was when the universe was a quarter of its current age.

Galaxy clusters are the universe's largest collections of items held together by gravity, and scientists hope the discovery of one at such an early stage will help them discover more about how the universe evolved.

Full story...

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Image credit: NASA/Telegraph.co.uk

Astronomers do it Again: Find Organic Molecules Around Gas Planet

2009-10-22T15:36:00.002+08:00

Peering far beyond our solar system, NASA researchers have detected the basic chemistry for life in a second hot gas planet, advancing astronomers toward the goal of being able to characterize planets where life could exist. The planet is not habitable but it has the same chemistry that, if found around a rocky planet in the future, could indicate the presence of life.

Swain and his co-investigators used data from two of NASA's orbiting Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, to study HD 209458b, a hot, gaseous giant planet bigger than Jupiter that orbits a sun-like star about 150 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. The new finding follows their breakthrough discovery in December 2008 of carbon dioxide around another hot, Jupiter-size planet, HD 189733b. Earlier Hubble and Spitzer observations of that planet had also revealed water vapor and methane.

Full story...

Source: Physorg.com
Image credit: Physorg.com

Largest Ring Around Saturn Discovered by Spitzer

2009-10-07T13:53:00.002+08:00

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.

The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

Saturn's newest halo is thick, too -- its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

Full Story...

Source: JPL/NASA News Release
Image credit: JPL/NASA

Hell planet where rock falls as rain found

2009-10-03T10:33:00.002+08:00

An artist's impression of COROT-7b, where pebbles fall as rain

COROT-7b, an alien planet where a rain of pebbles falls from clouds of rock vapour into lakes of molten lava, has been found by astronomers. Computer models of COROT-7b, a planet orbiting an orange dwarf star in the constellation Monoceros, 490 light years away, suggest that the world has a surface temperature hot enough to boil rock.

The research, by scientists at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, conjures up a vision of hell. COROT-7b, a rocky planet around twice the size of the Earth but of similar density, is only 1.6 million miles from its star: 23 times closer than the innermost planet in our solar system, Mercury, is to the Sun.

This proximity means that the planet is gravitationally locked, like the Moon to the Earth, so that one side of the planet always faces the star.So while its far side is in perpetual freezing darkness - around 50 degrees above absolute zero - its near side is a balmy 2,800C.

While scientists are not sure of the exact chemical makeup of the planet, the sheer temperatures mean that whatever it is, the rocky ground will boil, forming a mineral atmosphere. And when cold fronts move in, small pebbles will condense and form rain and hail, just like water on Earth.

COROT-7b was discovered by the European Space Agency space telescope COROT in February, but the Washington University researchers were the first to model its atmosphere.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Image credit: EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY

NASA Spacecraft Sees Ice on Mars Exposed by Meteor Impacts

2009-09-25T10:24:00.002+08:00

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed frozen water hiding just below the surface of mid-latitude Mars. The spacecraft's observations were obtained from orbit after meteorites excavated fresh craters on the Red Planet.

Scientists controlling instruments on the orbiter found bright ice exposed at five Martian sites with new craters that range in depth from approximately half a meter to 2.5 meters (1.5 feet to 8 feet). The craters did not exist in earlier images of the same sites. Some of the craters show a thin layer of bright ice atop darker underlying material. The bright patches darkened in the weeks following initial observations, as the freshly exposed ice vaporized into the thin Martian atmosphere. One of the new craters had a bright patch of material large enough for one of the orbiter's instruments to confirm it is water-ice.

The finds indicate water-ice occurs beneath Mars' surface halfway between the north pole and the equator, a lower latitude than expected in the Martian climate.

Read News Release here
Source: NASA's News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL

It's Official: Water Found on the Moon

2009-09-24T11:38:00.002+08:00

This Mini-RF image from NASA's powerful Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows radar imagery of the lunar south pole, a potential reservoir for hidden water ice, in new images released Sept. 17, 2009.

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA's LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

The moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but the water is said to exist on the moon in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, researchers said.

Full story...
Source: Space.com
Image credit: NASA/APL/LPI/Space.com

NASA's Spitzer Spots Clump of Swirling Planetary Material

2009-09-24T11:28:00.002+08:00

This artist's conception shows a lump of material in a swirling, planet-forming disk.

Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. The observations, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, offer a rare look into the early stages of planet formation.

Planets form out of swirling disks of gas and dust. Spitzer observed infrared light coming from one such disk around a young star, called LRLL 31, over a period of five months. To the astronomers' surprise, the light varied in unexpected ways, and in as little time as one week. Planets take millions of years to form, so it's rare to see anything change on time scales we humans can perceive.

One possible explanation is that a close companion to the star -- either a star or a developing planet -- could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star.

Full story...
Source: NASA/JPL News Release
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

New Views of Our Milky Way Revealed

2009-09-23T10:55:00.002+08:00

New photographs of the center of the Milky Way reveal the chaotic environment at the heart of our galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is thought to lurk.

The close-up views come from two recent projects - one undertaken by an amateur astronomer. Stephane Guisard, an engineer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, used his personal 10-cm telescope to take 1,200 individual images over 29 nights during his free time. He then combined the photos, which took a total of more than 200 hours of exposure time, into a stunning mosaic image of the Milky Way's center.

The vista reveals an area of the sky spanning from the constellation Sagittarius to the constellation Scorpius. Running through the image is the dusty track of the Milky Way's disk - the dense Frisbee shape that contains the spiral arms of the galaxy. Colorful nebulae - including the pink cloud of the Lagoon Nebula (also known as Messier 8) - where furious star formation is occurring - dot the scene.

Source: Yahoo News!
Image credit: REUTERS/Stephane Guisard/ESO/Handout

Scientists Complete First Geological Global Map Of Jupiter's Satellite Ganymede

2009-09-19T12:08:00.002+08:00

Scientists have assembled the first global geological map of the Solar System's largest moon – and in doing so have gathered new evidence into the formation of the large, icy satellite.

Wes Patterson, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, led a seven-year effort to craft a detailed map of geological features on Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter. Patterson and a half-dozen scientists from several institutions compiled the global map – only the third ever completed of a moon, after Earth's moon and Jupiter's cratered satellite Callisto – using images from NASA's historic Voyager and Galileo missions.

Full story...
Image credit: Europlanet Media Centre

First great snapshots from new vision of Hubble space telescope

2009-09-10T10:37:00.002+08:00

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula. With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. A new spectrograph slices across billions of light-years to map the filamentary structure of the universe and trace the distribution of elements that are fundamental to life. The telescope's new instruments also are more sensitive to light and can observe in ways that are significantly more efficient and require less observing time than previous generations of Hubble instruments. NASA astronauts installed the new instruments during the space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. Besides adding the instruments, the astronauts also completed a dizzying list of other chores that included performing unprecedented repairs on two other science instruments.

More new Hubble images...

Source: NASA press release
Images credit: NASA JPL

Newfound Moon May Be Source of Outer Saturn Ring

2009-09-07T11:38:00.001+08:00

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc. Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over the course of about 600 days found the tiny moonlet, half a kilometer (about a third of a mile) across, embedded within a partial ring, or ring arc, previously found by Cassini in Saturn's tenuous G ring.

The finding is being announced today in an International Astronomical Union circular. Images can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org.

Full story...

Image credit: JPL/NASA

Shadow of Saturn's moons

2009-09-05T15:46:00.002+08:00

The shadow of the moon Janus dwarfs the shadow of Daphnis on Saturn's A ring in this image taken as the planet approached its August 2009 equinox.

Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) orbits in the A ring's Keeler Gap and, along with the moon's attending edge waves, can be seen casting a short shadow in the top left quadrant of the image. Equinox has exposed shadows cast by these edge waves, or vertical structures of ring material created by Daphnis' gravity.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is not pictured here, but the moon's shadow stretches across the A ring from the center of the image to near the Encke Gap on the left of the image. The Cassini Division appears bright on the right of the image.

The novel illumination geometry created around the time of Saturn's August 2009 equinox allows out-of-plane structures and moons orbiting in or near the plane of Saturn's equatorial rings to cast shadows onto the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn's equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. To learn more about this special time and to see movies of moons' shadows moving across the rings, see Moon Shadow in Motion and Weaving a Shadow.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 27 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 11, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 491,000 kilometers (305,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 26 degrees. Image scale is 26 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel.

Image credit: JPL NASA

Newfound Planet Might Be Near Death

2009-08-28T16:52:00.002+08:00

This artist's impression depicts an exoplanet similar to the newly discovered WASP-18b. As seen from the planet, the host star spans an angle of more than 30 degree and hovers menacingly at a fixed position in the sky.

A newly discovered planet that whips around its star in less than a day may have been found mere cosmic moments before its demise.

The planet, WASP-18b, is one of the "hot Jupiter" class of planets that are huge in size (10 times the mass of Jupiter in this case), but orbit very close to their stars. Their very existence was surprising to astronomers when the first of them were found a few years back. Now they've become common discoveries.

But this scorched, gaseous world is only one of two known exoplanets that orbits its star in less than one Earth day (0.94 days to be exact). Coupled with its hefty mass, this leads to strong gravitational tugs between the planet and its star, WASP-18. (WASP stands for the Wide Angle Search for Planets, run by several universities in Britain.)

Full story...
Image credit: C. CARREAU/ESA/Nature
News source: livescience.com

Amateur Captures Solar Eclipse on Jovian Moons

2009-08-20T12:02:00.003+08:00

On August 16th, Philippine astrophotographer Christopher Go used a modern 11-inch Celestron telescope to photograph Io casting its shadow on Ganymede. "I captured this rare event through a hole in the clouds," says Go. "It was a lucky clearing!"

In the movie, Io and Ganymede reveal themselves as fully-formed worlds with surface markings and a spherical shape. Io's circular shadow cuts a dark swath across Ganymede, transforming that giant moon (it is larger than Mercury) into a succession of crescents rarely seen by observers. Indeed, as far as we know, no telescope on Earth or space has ever photographed one of Jupiter's moons casting its circular shadow so clearly across another.

Source: Spaceweather.com

NASA Researchers Make First Discovery of Life's Building Block in Comet

2009-08-18T11:49:00.002+08:00

NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

"Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet," said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."

Elsila is the lead author of a paper on this research accepted for publication in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The research will be presented during the meeting of the American Chemical Society at the Marriott Metro Center in Washington, DC, August 16.

Full Story...
Image credit: NASA

New exoplanet orbits 'backwards'

2009-08-14T11:28:00.002+08:00

Astronomers have discovered the first planet that orbits in the opposite direction to the spin of its star.Planets form out of the same swirling gas cloud that creates a star, so they are expected to orbit in the same direction that the star rotates. The new planet is thought to have been flung into its "retrograde" orbit by a close encounter with either another planet or with a passing star.

The new object has been named WASP-17b. It is the 17th exoplanet to have been discovered by the Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) consortium of UK universities.
The gas giant is about twice the size of Jupiter, but has about half the mass. This bloatedness might also be rooted in the close encounter that changed the planet's direction. WASP-17b was detected using an array of cameras set up to monitor hundreds of thousands of stars.

The work has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal for publication.

Source: BBC Science

Scientists spot massive methane rainstorm over Titan

2009-08-14T11:07:00.003+08:00

In this 2007 file photo, bright mid-latitude clouds near the bottom of this view hint at the ongoing cycling of methane on Titan.

Astronomers have discovered a storm system on Titan the size of India. It popped up in April 2008 in the moon's tropics, a latitude belt not known for cloudiness. The storm, reported in the latest edition of the journal Nature, is another "a-ha" moment as scientists try to figure out how Titan's bizarre atmosphere works and the forces responsible for sculpting the moon's surface.The events suggested an atmosphere whose storm systems can significantly disturb Titan's equivalent of Earth's jet streams, triggering cloudiness elsewhere. It also helps explain why the surface in the tropics appears heavily sculpted by liquids despite the general dearth of clouds, the team suggests.

The European Space Agency's Huygens probe in 2004 returned pictures of what looked liked stream beds and other features seemingly carved by liquid on Titan's surface. Their structures implied they had formed under heavy downpours, much like what one sees in the US's desert Southwest. Indeed, the longer researchers stare at Titan, the more Earth-like its processes appear – processes playing out right before their telescopes' and spacecraft's sensors.

Full Story...
Image credit: JPL NASA

Two planetary body collided in distant star

2009-08-11T11:32:00.002+08:00

View related animation (25 Mb)

This artist's concept shows a celestial body about the size of our moon slamming at great speed into a body the size of Mercury. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence that a high-speed collision of this sort occurred a few thousand years ago around a young star, called HD 172555, still in the early stages of planet formation. The star is about 100 light-years from Earth.

Spitzer detected the signatures of vaporized and melted rock, in addition to rubble, all flung out from the giant impact. Further evidence from the infrared telescope shows that these two bodies must have been traveling at a velocity relative to each other of at least 10 kilometers per second (about 22,400 miles per hour).

As the bodies slammed into each other, a huge flash of light would have been emitted. Rocky surfaces were vaporized and melted, and hot matter was sprayed everywhere. Spitzer detected the vaporized rock in the form of silicon monoxide gas, and the melted rock as a glassy substance called obsidian. On Earth, obsidian can be found around volcanoes, and in black rocks called tektites often found around meteor craters.

Shock waves from the collision would have traveled through the planet, throwing rocky rubble into space. Spitzer also detected the signatures of this rubble.

In the end, the larger planet is left skinned, stripped of its outer layers. The core of the smaller body and most of its surface were absorbed by the larger one. This merging of rocky bodies is how planets like Earth are thought to form.

Astronomers say a similar type of event stripped Mercury of its crust early on in the formation of our solar system, flinging the removed material away from Mercury, out into space and into the sun. Our moon was also formed by this type of high-speed impact: a body the size of Mars is thought to have slammed into a young Earth about 30 to 100 million years after the sun formed. The sun is now 4.5 billion years old. According to this theory, the resulting molten rock, vapor and shattered debris mixed with debris from Earth to form a ring around our planet. Over time, this debris coalesced to make the moon.

Source: NASA's News Release
Image credit: NASA

Meteorite Found on Mars Yields Clues About Planet's Past

2009-08-11T11:21:00.002+08:00

This view of a rock called "Block Island," the largest meteorite yet found on Mars, comes from the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity is investigating a metallic meteorite the size of a large watermelon that is providing researchers more details about the Red Planet's environmental history.

The rock, dubbed "Block Island," is larger than any other known meteorite on Mars. Scientists calculate it is too massive to have hit the ground without disintegrating unless Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than it has now when the rock fell. An atmosphere slows the descent of meteorites. Additional studies also may provide clues about how weathering has affected the rock since it fell.

Two weeks ago, Opportunity had driven approximately 180 meters (600 feet) past the rock in a Mars region called Meridiani Planum. An image the rover had taken a few days earlier and stored was then transmitted back to Earth. The image showed the rock is approximately 60 centimeters (2 feet) in length, half that in height, and has a bluish tint that distinguishes it from other rocks in the area. The rover team decided to have Opportunity backtrack for a closer look, eventually touching Block Island with its robotic arm.

Source: NASA's News Release
Image credit: NASA

NASA's Kepler Mission Spies Changing Phases in a Distant World

2009-08-07T11:48:00.002+08:00

NASA's new exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope has detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating the telescope's extraordinary scientific capabilities. The discovery will be published Friday in the journal Science.

The find is based on a relatively short 10 days of test data collected before the official start of science operations. Kepler was launched March 6, 2009, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The observation demonstrates the extremely high precision of the measurements made by the telescope, even before its calibration and data analysis software were finished.

"As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene," said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!"

Kepler team members say these new data indicate the mission is indeed capable of finding Earth-like planets, if they exist. Kepler will spend the next three-and-a-half years searching for planets as small as Earth, including those that orbit stars in a warm zone where there could be water. It will do this by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars, which occur when orbiting planets transit, or cross in front of, the stars.

"When the light curves from tens of thousands of stars were shown to the Kepler science team, everyone was awed; no one had ever seen such exquisitely detailed measurements of the light variations of so many different types of stars," said William Borucki, the principal science investigator and lead author of the paper.

The observations were collected from a planet called HAT-P-7, known to transit a star located about 1,000 light years from Earth. The planet orbits the star in just 2.2 days and is 26 times closer than Earth is to the sun. Its orbit, combined with a mass somewhat larger than the planet Jupiter, classifies this planet as a "hot Jupiter." It is so close to its star, the planet is as hot as the glowing red heating element on a stove.

The Kepler measurements show the transit from the previously detected HAT-P-7. However, these new measurements are so precise, they also show a smooth rise and fall of the light between transits caused by the changing phases of the planet, similar to those of our moon. This is a combination of both the light emitted from the planet and the light reflected off the planet. The smooth rise and fall of light is also punctuated by a small drop in light, called an occultation, exactly halfway between each transit. An occultation happens when a planet passes behind a star.

The new Kepler data can be used to study this hot Jupiter in unprecedented detail. The depth of the occultation and the shape and amplitude of the light curve show the planet has an atmosphere with a day-side temperature of about 4,310 degrees Fahrenheit. Little of this heat is carried to the cool night side. The occultation time compared to the main transit time shows the planet has a circular orbit. The discovery of light from this planet confirms the predictions by researchers and theoretical models that the emission would be detectable by Kepler.

This new discovery also demonstrates Kepler has the precision to find Earth-size planets. The observed brightness variation is just one and a half times what is expected for a transit caused by an Earth-sized planet. Although this is already the highest precision ever obtained for an observation of this star, Kepler will be even more precise after analysis software being developed for the mission is completed.
"This early result shows the Kepler detection system is performing right on the mark," said David Koch, deputy principal investigator of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "It bodes well for Kepler's prospects to be able to detect Earth-size planets."

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission. Ames is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., is responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supporting mission operations.

For images, animations and more information about the Kepler mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

Source: NASA's press release

Martian methane mystery deepens

2009-08-06T11:09:00.001+08:00

Methane on Mars is produced and destroyed far faster than on Earth, according to analysis of recent data.Scientists in Paris used a computer climate model for the Red Planet to simulate observations made from Earth.It shows the gas is unevenly distributed in the Martian atmosphere and changes with the seasons.The presence of methane on Mars is intriguing because its origin could either be life or geological activity - including volcanism. The results the French team used were published in January this year in the journal Science. They were gathered by an American team using a technique called infrared spectroscopy at three different ground-based telescopes to monitor about 90% of the planet's surface.

In 2003 "plumes" of methane were identified. At one point, the primary plume of methane contained an estimated 19,000 tonnes of the gas.Dr Michael Mumma, director of Nasa's Goddard Center for Astrobiology and lead author on the previous paper, told BBC News it was vital to understand how methane was destroyed on Mars and to explain how so much of the gas is produced and destroyed so quickly on the Red Planet.Dr Mumma does not rule out a biological explanation for the phenomenon but says it is possible that geology alone could be responsible.

Source: BBC Science

Sharpest views of Betelgeuse Imaged

2009-08-01T11:05:00.004+08:00

This artist's impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO's Very Large Telescope, which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. The scale in units of the radius of Betelgeuse as well as a comparison with the Solar System is also provided. Image: ESO

Enlarge the image

This collage shows the Orion constellation in the sky (Betelgeuse is identified by the marker), a zoom towards Betelgeuse, and the sharpest ever image of this supergiant star, which was obtained with NACO on ESO's Very Large Telescope. Image: ESO

Source: physorg.com

Possible Meteorite Imaged by Opportunity Rover

2009-08-01T10:23:00.002+08:00

This image of "Block Island" was taken on July 28, 2009, with the front hazard-identification camera on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

The Opportunity rover has eyed an odd-shaped, dark rock, about 0.6 meters (2 feet) across on the surface of Mars, which may be a meteorite. The team spotted the rock called "Block Island," on July 18, 2009, in the opposite direction from which it was driving. The rover then backtracked some 250 meters (820 feet) to study it closer. Scientists will be testing the rock with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to get composition measurements and to confirm if indeed it is a meteorite.

Image credit: NASA

Bright Spot on Venus Stumps Scientists

2009-07-31T13:21:00.002+08:00

A montage of ultraviolet images taken during several Venus Express orbit with the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) (each orbit is 24 hours long).

A sudden bright spot that appeared in the clouds of Venus just days after a comet left a bruise on Jupiter has scientists stumped as to its cause.

Venus' bright spot, first noticed by amateur astronomer Frank Melillo of Holtsville, NY on July 19, is not the first such brightening noticed on our cloudy neighbor, said planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This time is a little different though because the brightening is confined to a smaller region, Limaye said. It also came in the wake of Jupiter's own new (dark) spot, believed to be the result of a comet impact — Limaye attributes the fortunate confluence of the two events for the attention Venus is now getting in the astronomical community.After Melillo reported the spot, other amateur astronomers and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express spacecraft confirmed the presence of the blemish.The new Venus Express images show that the bright spot actually appeared in the planet's southern hemisphere four days before Melillo saw it and that it has since begun to spread out, becoming stretched by the wind's in Venus' thick atmosphere. But just what caused the brightening is still a mystery. Theories have abounded, from a volcanic eruption to solar particles interacting with the planet's atmosphere.

Source: Live Science
Image credit: ESA

Total Amateurs Discover 'Green Pea' Galaxies

2009-07-29T14:17:00.002+08:00

Armchair astronomers have helped discover a batch of tiny galaxies that may help professional astronomers understand how galaxies formed stars in the early universe.

Dubbed the "Green Peas," the galaxies are forming stars 10 times faster then the Milky Way despite being 10 times smaller and 100 times less massive. They are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away.
The discoveries were made as part of a project called Galaxy Zoo, where Internet users volunteer their spare time to help classify galaxies for an online image database.

Murmurs of a potential discovery began when a group of volunteers who called themselves the "Peas Corps" and the "Peas Brigade" started a discussion in an online forum about a group of strange bright green objects. The original forum thread was called "Give peas a chance."

The volunteers – many of whom had no previous astronomy background or experience – were asked to refine their image samples and submit them to a lab for color analysis. Once the findings were verified, researchers analyzed the light emanating from the galaxies to determine the degree of star formation taking place within them.

Source: Space.com

Nasa finds monster black hole sucking up gas, dust and stars at centre of galaxy

2009-07-26T11:57:00.002+08:00

The galaxy NGC-1097 with a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars at its centre Photo: REUTERS / NASA

Nasa has found a monster black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun feeding off gas, dust and stars at the centre of a galaxy 50 million light-years away. The star-ringed black hole forms the eye of a galaxy called NGC-1097 which was photographed by the US space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope in California.

A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational pull is so powerful that nothing, including whole planets, can escape being sucked in if they come within its reach. The galaxy in the photograph is spiral-shaped, like our Milky Way, and extends long arms of red stars into space. But Nasa said the black hole at the centre of the galaxy in which Earth is situated is tame by comparison to NGC-1097, with the mass of just a few million suns. The picture shows a fiery ring around the black hole which is packed with brightly-burning newborn stars. The galaxy's red spiral arms and swirling spokes between them show dust heated by newborn stars, while older populations of stars scattered through the galaxy are blue. A fuzzy blue dot to the left of the image shows a companion galaxy, while other dots are either stars in the Milky Way, or other more distant galaxies.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Giant 'soap bubble' found floating in space

2009-07-25T14:35:00.002+08:00

IT LOOKS like a soap bubble or perhaps even a camera fault, but the image at right is a newly discovered planetary nebula.

Dave Jurasevich of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California spotted the "Cygnus Bubble" while recording images of the region on 6 July 2008. A few days later, amateur astronomers Mel Helm and Keith Quattrocchi also found it.

The bubble, which was officially named PN G75.5+1.7 last week, has been there a while. A closer look at images from the second Palomar Sky Survey revealed it had the same size and brightness 16 years ago. Jurasevich thinks it was overlooked because it is very faint.

Planetary nebulae, which got their name after being misidentified by early astronomers, are formed when an ageing star weighing up to eight times the mass of the sun ejects its outer layers as clouds of luminous gas. Most are elliptical, double-lobed or cigar-shaped, evolving after stars eject gas from each pole.

Source: Newscientist.com
Image credit: Travis A. Rector/U of Alaska Anchorage/Heidi Schweiker/NOAO

World's largest telescope to be built in Hawaii

2009-07-22T13:50:00.002+08:00

Hawaii was chosen Tuesday as the site for the world's biggest telescope, a device so powerful that it will allow scientists to see some 13 billion light years away and get a glimpse into the early years of the universe.

The telescope's mirror — stretching almost 100 feet in diameter, or nearly the length of a Boeing 737's wingspan — will be so large that it should be able to gather light that will have spent 13 billion years traveling to earth. This means astronomers looking into the telescope will be able to see images of the first stars and galaxies forming — some 400 million years after the Big Bang.

The telescope, expected to be completed by 2018, will be located atop a dormant volcano that is popular with astronomers because its summit sits well above the clouds at 13,796 feet, offering a clear view of the sky above for 300 days a year.

Full Story...
Source: AP

New NASA Images Indicate Object Hits Jupiter

2009-07-22T11:34:00.002+08:00

This image shows a large impact on Jupiter's south polar region captured on July 20, 2009, by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Infrared Telescope Facility

Scientists have found evidence that another object has bombarded Jupiter, exactly 15 years after the first impacts by the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

Following up on a tip by an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley of Australia, that a new dark "scar" had suddenly appeared on Jupiter, this morning between 3 and 9 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. and noon EDT) scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact.

New infrared images show the likely impact point was near the south polar region, with a visibly dark "scar" and bright upwelling particles in the upper atmosphere detected in near-infrared wavelengths, and a warming of the upper troposphere with possible extra emission from ammonia gas detected at mid-infrared wavelengths.

Full story...
Image credit: NASA

New images of Moon landing sites

2009-07-20T11:07:00.003+08:00

Apollo 14: Science instruments (circled left) and the lunar module descent stage (circled right) are connected by a footprint trail

A US spacecraft has captured images of Apollo landing sites on the Moon, revealing hardware and a trail of footprints left on the lunar surface. The release of the images coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the Moon. The descent stages from the lunar modules which carried astronauts to and from the Moon can clearly be seen. The image of the Apollo 14 landing site shows scientific instruments and an astronaut footpath in the lunar dust. It is the first time hardware left on the Moon by the Apollo missions has been seen from lunar orbit. The pictures were taken by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft, which launched on 18 June.

Full story...
Image credit: NASA

Mars Dust Devil Has Colorful Effect in Image Series

2009-07-15T13:45:00.004+08:00

Scientists have combined a trio of shots taken seconds apart through different colored filters to create a special-effects portrait of a moving dust devil on Mars.

The panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was taking exposures through different filters during the 1,919th Martian day of Spirit's mission (May 27, 2009) as part of constructing a large color panorama. Three westward shots, with several seconds intervening between them, caught a whirlwind in motion. A composite image combining the three exposures to make a color image of the Martian ground shows the dust devil in different colors, according to where it was on the horizon when each exposure was taken.

Dust devils occur on both Mars and on Earth when solar energy heats the surface, resulting in a layer of warm air just above the surface. Since the warmed air is less dense than the cooler atmosphere above it, it rises, making a swirling thermal plume that picks up the fine dust from the surface and carries it up into the atmosphere. This plume of dust moves with the local wind.

More than 650 dust devils have been recorded by Spirit since its operations began in 2004. The mission is currently in its third season of dust devils on Mars, which typically begin in Martian spring.

Source: NASA
Image credit: NASA

Scientists Discover New Black Hole 500x Larger Than The Sun

2009-07-03T10:58:00.001+08:00

An artist's impression of HLX-1 (credit: Heidi Sagerud)

Until now, there have been two known types of black holes: stellar-mass black holes that are several times more massive than our sun and are created when really big stars die out, and supermassive black holes that are millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and which sit in the center of most, maybe all, galaxies, including our own Milky Way. While astrophysicists have been fairly certain of how the smaller black holes are created, the creation of the larger ones has been largely a mystery. The main hypothesis is that they are formed from the merger of multiple medium-size black holes. But no one had ever confirmed the existence of black holes of this size. Until this week.

A team led by scientists at the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France reports in today’s issue of Nature that they have found a black hole that is more than 500 times more massive than the sun. They found an X-ray source, now named Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1 (HLX-1), on the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49 that has a maximum X-ray brightness about 260 million times that of the sun. As gas falls into a black hole, energy is released, much of it in the form of X-rays. Only a medium-size black hole could create an X-ray signature that bright, the scientists say.

News Source: Smithsonian.com

Hint of planet outside our galaxy

2009-06-15T13:11:00.002+08:00

The first planet to be seen outside the Milky Way may lie in Andromeda

Astronomers believe they have seen hints of the first planet to be spotted outside of our galaxy. Situated in the Andromeda galaxy, the planet appears to be about six times the mass of Jupiter. The method hinges on gravitational lensing, whereby a nearer object can bend the light of a distant star when the two align with an observer.

Full story...
Image Credit: NASA

Pan's Slender Shadow

2009-06-12T12:30:00.002+08:00

Saturn's moon Pan casts a delicate shadow onto the planet's A ring.

Shown in the center of this image, Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across) orbits within the Encke Gap of the A ring. Other bright specks in the image are background stars. As Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox, the planet's moons cast shadows onto the rings.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 51 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 2, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 108 degrees. Image scale is 9 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Latest Image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

2009-06-12T12:26:00.002+08:00

This image shows two craters in the southern hemisphere just south of Sirenum Fossae.

The northern crater is smaller, appears more degraded, and is partially filled with sediments that form a hummocky surface. Dunes have formed subsequently on this surface. Some incipient gully-like features have formed midway along the southern crater wall and expose layers that are more resistant to erosion.

The larger crater to the south is eroded by gullies on its northern slope while the southern slope region lacks them. Most gullies in this scene appear to emanate from more resistant layers, although the larger gullies have eroded back almost to the crater rim.

The nature of the layers and their connection to the water that formed the gullies is unknown. Gullies typically form when flowing water erodes sediments and soft rocks in a channelized flow. Because Mars is very cold and dry, it is unknown where the water came from to form the gullies.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Baby Stars Finally Found in Jumbled Galactic Center

2009-06-11T12:31:00.004+08:00

This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows three baby stars in the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The heart of our spiral galaxy is cluttered with stars, dust and gas, and at its very center, a supermassive black hole. The results revealed three stars with clear signs of youth, for example, certain warm, dense gases. These youthful features are found in other places in the galaxy where stars are being formed. The young stellar objects are all less than about 1 million years old. They are embedded in cocoons of gas and dust, which will eventually flatten to disks that, according to theory, later lump together to form planets.

Full Story...

Image Credit: JPL NASA

Popular giant star, Betelgeuse, shrinks mysteriously

2009-06-10T11:51:00.005+08:00

A massive red star in the constellation Orion has shrunk in the past 15 years and astronomers don't know why. Called Betelgeuse, the star is considered a red supergiant. Such massive stars are nearing the ends of their lives and can swell to 100 times their original size before exploding as supernovae, or possibly just collapsing to form black holes without violent explosions (as one study suggested). In 1993, measurements put Betelgeuse's radius at about 5.5 astronomical units (AU), where one AU equals the average Earth-sun distance of 93 million miles, or about 150 million km. Since then it has shrunk in size by 15 percent. That means the star's radius has contracted by a distance equal to the orbit of Venus.

Full story...
Image credit: NASA

Supermassive Black Hole found in nearby galaxy

2009-06-09T13:10:00.004+08:00

The most massive black hole yet weighed lurks at the heart of the relatively nearby giant galaxy M87. The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new measure suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest, and it could help astronomers solve a longstanding puzzle about galaxy development.

Details...

Image credit: Robert Gendler

New Mars Images: Craters and channels in Hephaestus Fossae

2009-06-08T13:15:00.003+08:00

The High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has obtained images of Hephaestus Fossae, a region on Mars dotted with craters and channel systems. Hephaestus Fossae lies at about 21° North and 126° East on the Red Planet. Named after the Greek god of fire, it extends for more than 600 km on the western flank of Elysium Mons in the Utopia Planitia region. Obtained on 28 December 2007, the images have a ground resolution of about 16 m/pixel. They show that the region has channel systems of unknown origin.

Images credit: ESA (European Space Agency)

More Images...

Mysterious supernova may have carbon origins

2009-06-05T11:49:00.002+08:00

A weird explosion in space that confounded astronomers may have been the destruction of a rare star with an unusual amount of carbon dust surrounding it, according to research carried out by scientists at the University of Warwick.

The explosion, which was first spotted on 21 February 2006 during a survey of a galaxy cluster in the constellation of Boötes by the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has perplexed astronomers. Normal supernovae usually take around three weeks to reach peak brightness; this object, designated SCP 06F6, took 100 days to rise to magnitude +21, before taking another hundred days to fade away. Normal supernovae tend to have more asymmetric light curves than that. Furthermore, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft spotted a bright X-ray glow coming from SCP 06F6, and yet no host galaxy has ever been identified. Even the distance to SCP 06F6 has been uncertain, because astronomers have been unable to decode the spectrum of the explosion, until now.

Details...

Cassini Finds Titan's Clouds Hang on to Summer

2009-06-04T13:29:00.002+08:00

Cloud chasers studying Saturn's moon Titan say its clouds form and move much like those on Earth, but in a much slower, more lingering fashion. Their forecast for Titan's early autumn -- warm and wetter. Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have monitored Titan's atmosphere for three-and-a-half years, between July 2004 and December 2007, and observed more than 200 clouds. They found that the way these clouds are distributed around Titan matches scientists' global circulation models. The only exception is timing -- clouds are still noticeable in the southern hemisphere while fall is approaching.

Details...

Distant world circles tiny star

2009-06-02T11:40:00.003+08:00

A distant "sun" residing in the constellation Aquila has become the smallest star known to host a planet. The discovery of a Jupiter-like "exoplanet" orbiting the star VB 10 is the first to be made using the astrometry method. Astrometry is based on measuring small changes in a star's position. At one-twelfth the mass of the Sun, VB 10 is tiny; though the star is more massive than its planet, it would have about the same girth, experts say. Astrometry has long been proposed as a tool for finding other planets, but this is the method's first "catch". The results are to be published in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal. Using astrometry to find exoplanets involves measuring the precise motions of a star on the sky as an unseen planet tugs the star back and forth. It is best suited to finding planets with large orbits around their parent stars. But the method requires very precise measurements over long periods of time.

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Mars orbiter imagery boosts Curiosity rover's life search

2009-06-01T14:37:00.002+08:00

NASA and university scientists reviewing data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) say evidence is growing that the planet harbored life in its past or that Martian microbes exist now.

They say their views are based on the growing body of data on the diversity of water related minerals discovered by MRO. It is also supported by findings from other spacecraft such as Europe's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Phoenix lander and twin Mars rovers.

Image Caption: Gale Crater has been selected as a landing site candidate for the "Curiosity" Mars Science Laboratory lander based on this image acquired by the MRO spacecraft showing diverse water related minerals in what was likely a giant Martin lake. Credit: NASA

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MESSENGER reveals a very dynamic planet Mercury

2009-05-05T13:24:00.002+08:00

A NASA spacecraft gliding over the surface of Mercury has revealed that the planet's atmosphere, the interaction of its surrounding magnetic field with the solar wind, and its geological past display greater levels of activity than scientists first suspected. The probe also discovered a previously unknown large impact basin about 430 miles in diameter -- equal to the distance between Washington and Boston.

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Nasa finds 'missing' Mars mineral

2008-12-20T15:28:00.001+08:00

Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has finally spotted rocks on the Red Planet that bear carbonate minerals.The ingredients needed to make the rocks are very evident, so their absence had been a major puzzle.

One theory to explain the omission is the idea that water on Mars has been too acidic to allow carbonates.The rocks' identification now shows these harsh waters have not dominated all parts of Mars - and that is good news for the search for life.

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Sky survey yields new cosmic haul

2008-08-26T09:22:00.002+08:00

Astronomers looking through the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the world's largest survey of galaxies, have found a new haul of objects closer to home - including one with a potentially exotic origin.

By searching through a survey region known as Stripe 82, a team led by Dr Andrew Becker of the University of Washington, has discovered almost 50 new asteroid-sized bodies in the outer regions of our Solar System.

As part of a search for supernovae - exploding stars in distant galaxies - the robotic Sloan telescope in New Mexico revisited this area of the southern sky every three days.

By comparing images taken on different nights, the Washington team was able to detect the asteroids as they moved across the sky.
It's probably a mixture of ice and rock, rather like a comet
Dr Andrew Becker, University of Washington

As team member Dr Lynne Jones pointed out: "If you can find things that explode, you can also find things that move, but you need different tools to look for them."

While most of the newly discovered objects are normal members of the Kuiper belt, a large band of icy bodies stretching beyond the orbit of Neptune, there were also surprises.

The team discovered two Neptunian Trojans, asteroids which share the same orbit as the outermost giant planet.

"Jupiter has plenty of trojans," Dr Becker told me, "and we knew that Neptune must have a similar population of objects. Surprisingly, not many had been found before this survey."

The team's prize find is an object given the temporary designation of 2006 SQ372. This icy body is currently roughly two billion miles away, just closer to the Sun than Neptune, but is beginning a journey that will take it out to a distance of 150 billion miles from the Earth.

Solar System's newest member points to inner Oort Cloud

2008-08-19T13:34:00.000+08:00

An ice-rock minor planet 30 to 60 miles in diameter, discovered two years ago between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune (each being a mean distance of 2.72 and 4.35 billion kilometres from Earth respectively) could be a member of the ‘inner Oort Cloud’. But this is only part of the story as the object, dubbed 2006 SQ372, is currently at perihelion (the point where it’s closest to the Sun) on a highly elliptical orbit that will see it sail right out to nearly 1,600 astronomical units (an astronomical unit, or AU, being the distance between the Earth and Sun — 149,598,000 kilometres). That is 40 times the distance out to Pluto, or 239 billion kilometres. It will return in 22,500 years.

2006 SQ372, first discovered by a team from the University of Washington using Sloan Digital Sky Survey data (SDSS), is comparable to Sedna — another minor planet that has a highly elliptical orbit. Sedna’s eccentricity is 0.855 and its perihelion and aphelion positions are 76 and 975 AU respectively. The orbit of 2006 SQ372 has an eccentricity of 0.976 and its perihelion and aphelion distances are 24 and 2,010 AU. The ellipse of 2006 SQ372 is four times longer than it is wide and crosses the orbits of Pluto and Neptune. For comparison, Earth’s orbital eccentricity is 0.0167 and its perihelion and aphelion distances 0.983 and 1.017 AU respectively.

More Story...at http://astronomynow.com/080818NewObjectPointsToInnerOortCloud.html

Phoenix confirms water as mission gets extended

2008-08-02T15:07:00.000+08:00

Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples. scoop."We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."

With enticing results so far and the spacecraft in good shape, NASA also announced operational funding for the mission will extend through Sept. 30. The original prime mission of three months ends in late August. The mission extension adds five weeks to the 90 days of the prime mission.

"Phoenix is healthy and the projections for solar power look good, so we want to take full advantage of having this resource in one of the most interesting locations on Mars," said Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The soil sample came from a trench approximately 2 inches deep. When the robotic arm first reached that depth, it hit a hard layer of frozen soil. Two attempts to deliver samples of icy soil on days when fresh material was exposed were foiled when the samples became stuck inside the scoop. Most of the material in Wednesday's sample had been exposed to the air for two days, letting some of the water in the sample vaporize away and making the soil easier to handle.

"Mars is giving us some surprises," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "We're excited because surprises are where discoveries come from. One surprise is how the soil is behaving. The ice-rich layers stick to the scoop when poised in the sun above the deck, different from what we expected from all the Mars simulation testing we've done. That has presented challenges for delivering samples, but we're finding ways to work with it and we're gathering lots of information to help us understand this soil."

Since landing on May 25, Phoenix has been studying soil with a chemistry lab, TEGA, a microscope, a conductivity probe and cameras. Besides confirming the 2002 finding from orbit of water ice near the surface and deciphering the newly observed stickiness, the science team is trying to determine whether the water ice ever thaws enough to be available for biology and if carbon-containing chemicals and other raw materials for life are present.

Source: Spaceflightnow

New Video Sees Earth from Alien Perspective

2008-07-19T11:48:00.001+08:00

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has made a movie of the moon passing in front of the Earth from the probe's vantage point millions of miles away.

Astronomers plan to use the video to develop techniques to look for Earth-like worlds in other solar systems.

"Making a video of Earth from so far away helps the search for other life-bearing planets in the universe by giving insights into how a distant, Earth-like alien world would appear to us," said Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland and the principal investigator for the Deep Impact extended mission.

Deep Impact, which sent an impactor into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, is currently 31 million miles away from Earth on its way to a flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010.

During its cruise to Hartley 2, Deep Impact will be searching for extrasolar planets.

Deep Impact took several images of the Earth during a full planetary rotation; these images have been combined into a color video. During the video, the moon enters the frame as it orbits the Earth and then is shown transiting, or passing in front of, the Earth.

While other spacecraft, including Voyager 1 and Galileo, have imaged Earth and the moon from space, Deep Impact is the first to show a transit of Earth with enough detail to see large craters on the moon and oceans and continents on Earth.

"Our video shows some specific features that are important for observations of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars," said Drake Deming of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the deputy principal investigator for the extended mission. "A 'sun glint' can be seen in the movie, caused by light reflected from Earth's oceans, and similar glints to be observed from extrasolar planets could indicate alien oceans."

The team used infrared light to look at the Earth because plants reflect more strongly in the near-infrared, so the video will help scientists evaluate the potential for detecting vegetated land masses on alien planets.

Most of the nearly 300 extrasolar planets that have been found to date are Jupiter-sized behemoths, though a few "super-Earths," around four to nine times the mass of our planet, were recently detected.

NASA is currently studying planet-characterizing telescopes that would observe extrasolar planets as a single point of light and would distinguish land masses and oceans by changes in the total brightness, said planetary theorist Sara Seager of MIT and a co-investigator on the Deep impact extended mission.

See the video
News source: Yahoo News

Mars Lander Exposes More Ice

2008-07-16T19:13:00.001+08:00

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander used its robotic arm to expose more of the hard icy layer just below the Martian surface so that it can more easily gather a sample of the material for analysis.

The trench, informally called "Snow White," was about 8 by 12 inches (20 by 30 centimeters) after digging by the arm Saturday. Mission controllers sent commands to the spacecraft Monday to further extend the length of the trench by about 6 inches (15 centimeters).

Scientists said tests in a lab on Earth suggested more area must be exposed in order to collect a proper sample.

Full story...
PHOENIX Mars lander official site

Exploding asteroid theory strengthened by new clues

2008-07-15T20:55:00.000+08:00

Was the course of life on the planet altered 12,900 years ago by a giant comet exploding over Canada? New evidence found by University of Cincinnati Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ken Tankersley and colleagues suggests the answer is affirmative.

Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana in recent weeks is strengthening the case to attribute what happened 12,900 years ago in North America - when the end of the last Ice Age unexpectedly turned into a phase of extinction for animals and humans - to a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada.

Full Story...

Solar system a bit squashed, not nicely round

2008-07-03T13:24:00.000+08:00

The solar system may not be a nice round shape, but rather a bit squashed and oblong, according to data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft exploring the solar system's outer limits, scientists said on Wednesday.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 unmanned probes are now studying the edges of the heliosphere, the huge magnetic "bubble" around our solar system created by the solar wind as it runs up against the thin gas in interstellar space.

The solar wind is made up of electrically charged particles blown into space in all directions by the sun. The boundary between the heliosphere and the rest of interstellar space is known as the "termination shock."

Voyager 2 in August 2007 crossed this boundary 7.8 billion miles from the sun.

Voyager 1 had crossed the boundary in December 2004 about 10 billion miles away from Voyager 1 and almost a billion miles farther from the sun.

Scientists think this indicates that the bubble carved into interstellar space by the heliosphere, which extends well past the distant orbit of Pluto, is not perfectly round, and the solar system is shaped a bit like an oblong.

"Imagine a balloon is being blown up by the solar wind. You might imagine that if you took a balloon, which is mainly spherical, and pushed it against the wall, it would be blunted on one side," said Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology, one of the scientists involved in the research.

That's what has happened with the heliosphere, he said.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

The Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977 with a mission to fly by and observe the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. The two spacecraft then continued their mission into the outer solar system. They are flying through remote, cold and dark conditions, powered by long-life nuclear batteries in the absence of solar energy.

Amazing Image of Mercury

2008-01-17T09:37:00.000+08:00

Scientists are sifting through their first new views of the planet Mercury in more than three decades thanks to images beamed home by NASA's MESSENGER probe.

The car-sized spacecraft zipped past Mercury in a Monday flyby and is relaying more than 1,200 new images and other data back to eager scientists on Earth.

In one new image, released today, the planet's stark surface is shown peppered with small craters, each less than a mile (1.6 km) in diameter and carved into an area about 300 miles (482 km) across. MESSENGER used its narrow-angle camera to photograph the scene, which is dominated by a large, double-ringed crater dubbed Vivaldi after the Italian composer. While the crater was last seen by NASA's Mariner 10 probe, MESSENGER's camera observed it with unprecedented detail, researchers said.
Another new view reveals the first look at the half of Mercury left uncharted by Mariner 10.

During Monday's flyby, MESSENGER skimmed just 124 miles (200 km) above Mercury's surface and snapped photographs of about half of the estimated 55 percent of the planet that remained uncharted after Mariner 10's mission. In addition to imagery, the probe is expected to return a wealth of new observations made by its seven instruments to scrutinize Mercury's surface composition, magnetic field, tenuous atmosphere, unusually high density and other features.

Clearest Ever Image From Space

2007-09-05T10:28:00.000+08:00

The Cat's Eye Nebula as imaged conventionally by the Palomar 200in telescope (l) and with the Lucky Camera (r)

More Info...

Two Extrasolar Planets Discovered in Distant Star

2007-05-27T13:44:00.000+08:00

Astronomers from Texas universities found a pair of Jupiter-sized planets around a distant star. The star, HD 155358, that host the planets composed of very poor metals (only about 20 percent as much as the Sun). The fact that the star is lacking in metals has challanged the theories of planet formation. HD 155358 is slightly hotter than the Sun, but a bit less massive. Along with one other star (called HD 47536), HD 155358 contains the fewest metals of any star found to harbor planets.

One planet of the HD 155358 has an orbital period of 195 days and, at a minimum, is 90 percent as massive as Jupiter. It orbits HD 155358 at a distance of 0.6 AU. (An astronomical unit, or AU, is the Earth-Sun distance of 150 million km, or 93 million miles.) The other planet orbits HD 155358 in 530 days, with a minimum mass half that of Jupiter, at a distance of 1.2 AU.

Source: Spaceflightnow

NASA Telescope Finds Planets Thrive Around Stellar Twins

2007-03-30T10:40:00.000+08:00

The double sunset that Luke Skywalker gazed upon in the film "Star Wars" might not be a fantasy. Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have observed that planetary systems – dusty disks of asteroids, comets and possibly planets – are at least as abundant in twin-star systems as they are in those, like our own, with only one star. Since more than half of all stars are twins, or binaries, the finding suggests the universe is packed with planets that have two suns. Sunsets on some of those worlds would resemble the ones on Luke Skywalker's planet, Tatooine, where two fiery balls dip below the horizon one by one.

Previously, astronomers knew that planets could form in exceptionally wide binary systems, in which stars are 1,000 times farther apart than the distance between Earth and the sun, or 1,000 astronomical units. Of the approximately 200 planets discovered so far outside our solar system, about 50 orbit one member of a wide stellar duo.

The new Spitzer study focuses on binary stars that are a bit more snug, with separation distances between zero and 500 astronomical units. Until now, not much was known about whether the close proximity of stars like these might affect the growth of planets. Standard planet-hunting techniques generally don't work well with these stars, but, in 2005, a NASA-funded astronomer found evidence for a planet candidate in one such multiple-star system (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005-115).

Trilling and his colleagues used Spitzer's infrared, heat-seeking eyes to look not for planets, but for dusty disks in double-star systems. These so-called debris disks are made up of asteroid-like bits of leftover rock that never made it into rocky planets. Their presence indicates that the process of building planets has occurred around a star, or stars, possibly resulting in intact, mature planets.

In the most comprehensive survey of its kind, the team looked for disks in 69 binary systems between about 50 and 200 light-years away from Earth. All of the stars are somewhat younger and more massive than our middle-aged sun. The data show that about 40 percent of the systems had disks, which is a bit higher than the frequency for a comparable sample of single stars. This means that planetary systems are at least as common around binary stars as they are around single stars.

In addition, the astronomers were shocked to find that disks were even more frequent (about 60 percent) around the tightest binaries in the study. These coziest of stellar companions are between zero and three astronomical units apart. Spitzer detected disks orbiting both members of the star pairs, rather than just one. Extra-tight star systems like these are where planets, if they are present, would experience Tatooine-like sunsets.

NASA Spitzer News Release

Spitzer Captures Feeble Lights from Distant Worlds

2007-02-22T19:34:00.000+08:00

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect possible life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated.

Spitzer, a space-based infrared telescope, obtained the detailed data, called spectra, for two different gas exoplanets. Called HD 209458b and HD 189733b, these so-called "hot Jupiters" are, like Jupiter, made of gas, but orbit much closer to their suns.

The data indicate the two planets are drier and cloudier than predicted. Theorists thought hot Jupiters would have lots of water in their atmospheres, but surprisingly none was found around HD 209458b and HD 189733b. According to astronomers, the water might be present but buried under a thick blanket of high, waterless clouds.

Those clouds might be filled with dust. One of the planets, HD 209458b, showed hints of tiny sand grains, called silicates, in its atmosphere. This could mean the planet's skies are filled with high, dusty clouds unlike anything seen around planets in our own solar system.

Source: NASA's Spitzer News Release

Jupiter As Seen From Mars Orbit

2007-02-01T17:18:00.001+08:00

The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can take interesting astronomical pictures, team scientists report today. The High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) based at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson has produced a view of Jupiter as seen from Mars orbit. The scientists used the HiRISE camera to take a 10 megabyte image of Jupiter and its major satellites when they were calibrating the camera's pointing and color response on Jan. 11, 2007.

The full image can be seen here.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Hubble Sees Structure of Alien's World Atmosphere

2007-02-01T17:18:00.000+08:00

The powerful vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to study for the first time the layer-cake structure of the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. Hubble discovered a dense upper layer of hot hydrogen gas where the super-hot planet's atmosphere is bleeding off into space.

The planet, designated HD 209458b, is unlike any world in our solar system. It orbits so close to its star and gets so hot that its gas is streaming into space, making the planet appear to have a comet-like tail. This new research reveals the layer in the planet's upper atmosphere where the gas becomes so heated it escapes, like steam rising from a boiler.

HD 209458b is located 150 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.

Source: Hubble News Release

Titan Has Liquid Lakes, Scientists Report in Nature

2007-01-04T16:17:00.000+08:00

Scientists report definitive evidence of the presence of lakes filled with liquid methane on Saturn’s moon Titan in this week’s journal Nature cover story. Radar imaging data from a July 22, 2006, flyby provide convincing evidence for large bodies of liquid on Titan today. A new false-color radar view gives a taste of what Cassini saw.

Lake Characteristics:

-Radar-dark patches are interpreted as lakes based on their very low radar reflectivity and morphological similarities to lakes, including associated channels and location in topographic depressions.
-Radar-dark surfaces are smooth and most likely liquid, rock, ice or organics. More than 75 radar-dark patches or lakes were seen, ranging from 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) to more than 70 kilometers (43 miles) across.
-Some lakes appear partly dry, while others seem liquid-filled. Some of the partly filled lakes may never have filled fully, or may have partly evaporated at some point in the past. The dry lakes have margins or rims and a radar brightness similar to the rest of the surrounding terrain, making them appear devoid of liquid.
-The varying states of how full the lakes are suggest that lakes in this region of Titan might be temporary on some unknown timescale.
-Approximately 15 of the dark patches seem filled and show no clear evidence of erosion. These dark patches resemble terrestrial lakes confined within impact basins (for example, Clearwater Lakes in Canada) or within volcanic calderas (for example, Crater Lake, Oregon). The nest-like nature of these lakes and their limited range of sizes make it unlikely that they originated from an impact. A volcanic origin for the depressions is possible, given their appearance.
-Some lakes have steep margins and very distinct edges, suggesting a topographic rim. These lakes are consistent with seepage or groundwater drainage lakes.
-Other lakes have diffuse, more scalloped edges, with a gradual decrease in radar brightness towards the center of the lake. These lakes are more likely to be associated with channels, and may be either drainage lakes or groundwater drainage lakes.
-Yet other lakes have curvy channel-like extensions, similar in appearance to terrestrial flooded river valleys (for example Lake Powell).
-Bright patches near the lake edges could be small islands peeking through the surface. Floating “icebergs” are unlikely because most materials would not float in liquid hydrocarbons.

Source: JPL Newsletter

Spitzer Telescope Reveals Objects in Early Universe

2006-12-19T13:27:00.000+08:00

New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope strongly suggest that infrared light detected in a prior study originated from clumps of the very first objects of the universe. The recent data indicate this patchy light is splattered across the entire sky and comes from clusters of bright, monstrous objects more than 13 billion light-years away. Astronomers believe the objects are either the first stars - humongous stars more than 1,000 times the mass of our sun - or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If the objects are stars, then the observed clusters might be the first mini-galaxies containing a mass of less than about one million suns. The Milky Way galaxy holds the equivalent of approximately 100 billion suns and was probably created when mini-galaxies like these merged.

Read full story...

Source: NASA's Spitzer News Release

High Mountain Found on Saturn's Moon Titan

2006-12-13T12:35:00.000+08:00

Cassini spacecraft has found 1-mile-high mountain on Saturn's giant moon, Titan. The image was acquired during the probe flyby on the shrouded moon on October 25. The mountain stretches for nearly 100 miles long. It is the tallest ever seen on Titan and and probably formed from the same process that occurs in the Earth's mid-ocean ridge. A combination of infra-red and radar data was used to analyze the image.

Read press release here

Image Credit: NASA/ESA

Hubble Photographs Two Giant Binary Stars

2006-12-12T18:38:00.000+08:00

The small open star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the large emission nebula NGC 6357 in Sagittarius, about 8,000 light-years away from Earth. Some of the stars in this cluster are extremely massive and emit intense ultraviolet radiation. The brightest object in the picture is designated Pismis 24-1. It was once thought to weigh as much as 200 to 300 solar masses. This would not only have made it by far the most massive known star in the galaxy, but would have put it considerably above the currently believed upper mass limit of about 150 solar masses for individual stars. However, high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images of the star show that it is really two stars orbiting one another (inset pictures at top right and bottom right). They are estimated to each be 100 solar masses. The Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys images were taken in April 2006.

NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope News Release

Water Still Flowing on Mars!

2006-12-07T17:01:00.000+08:00

This is a big news! NASA announced today that they got images that have shown a strong sign that water is currently at present on Mars. One image revealed a crater site where two gullies flowed. The gullies suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years. The shape of the deposits strongly indicate water involved in the process. The new finding boost the expectation that microbial life could exist on Mars! I am glad I am still alive to look at this great discovery. The images were photographed by NASA's orbiter, Mars Global Survery which is now missing. The two sites are located in the Terra Sirenum and the Centauri Montes regions of southern Mars.

More pictures are available here

Read NASA News Release (as I received it via email):

NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years. "These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars," said Dr. Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, Washington.

Liquid water, as opposed to the water ice and water vapor known to exist at Mars, is considered necessary for life. The new findings heighten intrigue about the potential for microbial life on Mars. The Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor provided the new evidence. The deposits appear in images it took in 2004 and 2005 but not in a 1999 image of one site or a 2001 image of the other site."The shapes of these deposits are what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water," said Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego . "They have finger-like branches at the downhill end and are easily diverted around small obstacles." Malin is principal investigator for the camera and lead author of a report about the findings published in the journal Science.

The atmosphere of Mars is so thin and the temperature so cold that liquid water cannot persist at the surface. It would rapidly evaporate or freeze. Researchers propose that water could remain liquid long enough, after breaking out from an underground source, to carry debris downslope before totally freezing. The two fresh deposits are each several hundred meters, or yards, long.
The light tone of the deposits could be from surface frost continuously replenished by ice within the body of the deposit. Another possibility is a salty crust, which would be a sign of water's effects in concentrating the salts. If the deposits had resulted from dry dust slipping down the slope, they would likely be dark, based on the dark tones of dust freshly disturbed by rover tracks, dust devils and fresh craters on Mars.

Mars Global Surveyor has discovered tens of thousands of gullies on slopes inside craters and other depressions on Mars. Most gullies are at latitudes of 30 degrees or higher. Malin and his team first reported the discovery of the gullies in 2000. To look for changes that might indicate present-day flow of water, his camera team repeatedly imaged hundreds of the sites. One pair of images showed a gully that appeared after mid-2002. That site was on a sand dune, and the gully-cutting process was interpreted as a dry flow of sand.

Today's announcement is the first to reveal newly deposited material apparently carried by fluids after earlier imaging of the same gullies. The two sites are inside craters in the Terra Sirenum and the Centauri Montes regions of southern Mars."These fresh deposits suggest that at some places and times on present-day Mars, liquid water is emerging from beneath the ground and briefly flowing down the slopes. This possibility raises questions about how the water would stay melted below ground, how widespread it might be, and whether there's a below-ground wet habitat conducive to life. Future missions may provide the answers," said Malin.

Besides looking for changes in gullies, the orbiter's camera team assessed the rate at which new impact craters appear. The camera photographed approximately 98 percent of Mars in 1999 and approximately 30 percent of the planet was photographed again in 2006. The newer images show 20 fresh impact craters, ranging in diameter from 2 meters (7 feet) to 148 meters (486 feet) that were not present approximately seven years earlier. These results have important implications for determining the ages of features on the surface of Mars. These results also approximately match predictions and imply that Martian terrain with few craters is truly young.

Mars Global Surveyor began orbiting Mars in 1997. The spacecraft is responsible for many important discoveries. NASA has not heard from the spacecraft since early November. Attempts to contact it continue. Its unprecedented longevity has allowed monitoring Mars for over several years past its projected lifetime.

Image Credit: NASA

NASA Telescope Sees Black Hole Munch on a Star

2006-12-06T16:20:00.000+08:00

Astronomers witnessed a rare event when a monster black hole consumed a star. The complete process of the event from its first bite to final swallowing stage was successfully observed. Using the NASA's space-based-telescope, Galaxy Evolution Explorer, astronomers saw a bright ultraviolet flare when the star plunged into the giant black hole. The galaxy that host the black hole is located 4 billion light years away in the constellation Bootes.

News article can be read at NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer Website

MRO Snapped Pictures of Spirit Rover, Viking 1 and 2 Landing Sites!

2006-12-05T16:17:00.000+08:00

The new HiRISE images from Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (MRO) have been released. One of the image shows the durable Mars Rover Spirit and the area that it investigated, the landing site and the visible tracks of the rover. Click this link to see more detail of the marked areas as shown above.

The new released images also feature the landing site of Viking 1 and Viking 2
Follow this link to see the pictures of each area investigated by Viking 1 and Viking 2:

Viking 2 lander (Gerald Soffen Memorial Station)
Viking 1 lander (Thomas Mutch Memorial Station)

Image Credit: NASA

A Great Shot by the Missing Mars Global Surveyor

2006-11-21T17:08:00.000+08:00

Newsletter sent to me today, features a Mars image taken by Mars Global Surveyor (MGS}, which became MGS's picture of the week. As we know it, MGS is now missing from the radar contact for couples days and now two other NASA's spacecrafts currently orbiting Mars are commanded to search for the missing spacecraft.

And here's the latest great shot by MGS and as a MGS's picture of the week,

Click the image for larger version.

Image caption: Crisp details in a suite of mid-latitude gullies on a crater wall are captured in this Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) view obtained in southern winter on 12 October 2006. During southern winter, shadows are more pronounced and the atmosphere is typically quite clear. These gullies, which may have formed in relatively recent martian history by erosion caused by flowing, liquid water, are located in a crater on the east rim of Newton Crater near 40.4°S, 155.3°W. Sunlight illuminates the scene from the upper left. The picture covers an area about 3 km (1.9 mi) wide; the crater rim is on the right side of the image, the crater floor is on the left. North is toward the top/upper left.

Image/Caption Credit: Malin Space Science Systems

ESA's Satellite Images on Google Earth

2006-11-17T14:28:00.000+08:00

Ever wanted to see what volcanic eruptions, dust storms and changing ice glaciers look like from space? The European Space Agency (ESA) has created a special layer of content that will appear in Google Earth, enabling people to see over 130 new ESA satellite images including natural phenomena and manmade landmarks such as the Palm Islands in Dubai.

More at:
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMOAM0CYTE_index_0.html

Source: ESA News Release

Galaxy Cluster Host to Largest Known Radio Eruption

2006-11-03T12:34:00.000+08:00

View Larger Size

This is a new composite image of galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located about 2.6 billion light-years away in the constellation Camelopardus. The three views of the region were taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in Feb. 2006, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in Nov. 2003, and NRAO's Very Large Array in Oct. 2004. The Hubble image shows dozens of galaxies bound together by gravity. In Jan. 2005, astronomers reported that a supermassive black hole, lurking in the central bright galaxy, generated the most powerful outburst seen in the universe. The VLA radio image shows jets of high energy particles (in red) streaming from the black hole. These jets pushed the X-ray emitting hot gas (shown in blue in the Chandra image) aside to create two giant cavities in the gas. The cavities are evidence for the massive eruption. The X-ray and radio images show the enormous appetite of large black holes and the profound impact they have on their surroundings.

NASA's HST News Release

Hubble's View of Colliding Galaxies

2006-10-18T13:39:00.000+08:00

A new Hubble image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this
merging pair of galaxies. As the two galaxies smash together, thousand
of millions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. View the larger size here.

Full Story
Image Credit: ESA/NASA

Confirmed by Hubble, Epsilon Eridani B is the Closest Exoplanet

2006-10-10T19:08:00.000+08:00

The planet that detected in 2000 and orbiting a Sun-like star is confirmed to co-exist with debris disks around the parent star. The planet orbits its star, Epsilon Eridani, every 6.9 years and has 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter. The star is located 10.5 light years away, that makes this planet to be the closest extrasolar planet to us. Observation from Hubble indicated that this star is young, only 800 million years old that is why it still retains its debris disk.

Epsilon Eridani has long captivated the attention of science fiction writers, as well as astronomers. In 1960, years before the first extrasolar planet was detected, astronomer Frank Drake listened for radio transmissions from inhabitants of any possible planets around Epsilon Eridani as part of Project Ozma's search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. In the fictional "Star Trek" universe, Epsilon Eridani is considered by some fans to be the parent star for the planet Vulcan, Mr. Spock's home.

Full Story...

Hubble Survey Finds Numbers of Extrasolar Planets

2006-10-05T14:40:00.000+08:00

A Hubble Survey called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS) yielded a finding of Jupiter-sized planets orbiting very close to their parent stars in the central region of our galaxy. The survey covers 180.000 stars. The astronomers used a planet transit technique for the planet findings. Among the those new exoplanets, one has the shortest orbital period, named SWEEPS-10, swings around its star in 10 hours. Located only 740,000 miles from its star, the planet is among the hottest ever detected. It has an estimated temperature of approximately 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

More Story

Hubble Eyes Dark Clouds on Uranus

2006-10-05T14:35:00.000+08:00

Hubble spotted dark cloud formation in Uranus atmosphere. Measuring 1,100 miles by 1,900 miles (1,700 kilometers by 3,000 kilometers), the dark cloud is located at a latitude of 27 degrees in Uranus's northern hemisphere, which is just now becoming fully exposed to sunlight after many years of being in shadow. The development of a dark spot may be a signal of the oncoming uranian northern spring, said researchers.

More Story

NASA's New Mars Camera Gives Dramatic View of Planet

2006-10-01T21:01:00.000+08:00

Mars is ready for its close-up. The highest-resolution camera ever to orbit Mars is returning low-altitude images to Earth from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Rocks and surface features as small as armchairs are revealed in the first image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter since the spacecraft maneuvered into its final, low-altitude orbital path. The imaging of the red planet at this resolution heralds a new era in Mars exploration.

The image of a small fraction of Mars' biggest canyon reached Earth on Friday,
the beginning of a week of tests for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment
and other instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "We are elated at the sharpness of the image, revealing such fine detail in the landscape," said Dr. Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who is the principal investigator for this camera. The target area includes the deepest part of Ius Chasma, one portion of the vast Valles Marineris canyon. Valles Marineris is the largest known canyon in the solar system, as long as the distance from California to New York.

The image is available online at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/mro-20060929a.html

and http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/TRA/TRA_000823_1720/

The camera returned test images after Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter went into orbit around Mars on March 10, 2006, but those were from altitudes more than eight times as high as the orbiter is flying now. Since March, the spacecraft has shrunk its orbit by dipping more than 400 times into the top of the Martian atmosphere to shave
velocity. It is now flying in its final, nearly circular orbit at altitudes of 250 to 316 kilometers (155 to 196 miles). The orbit will remain this shape and size for the mission's two-year primary science phase, which begins in November.

During its primary science phase, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will return more data about the red planet than all previous missions combined, pouring data to Earth at about 10 times the rate of any earlier Mars spacecraft. Scientists will analyze the information to gain a better understanding of the distribution and history of
Mars' water - whether ice, vapor or liquid - and of the processes that formed and modified the planet's surface. In addition to the high-resolution camera, the orbiter's science payload includes a mineral-identifying spectrometer, a ground-penetrating radar, a context camera for imaging wide swaths of the surface, a wide-angle color imager for monitoring the entire planet daily, and an instrument for mapping and monitoring water vapor
and other constituents in the atmosphere.

For most of October, Mars will be passing nearly behind the sun from Earth's perspective. Communication will be intermittent. Activities will be minimal for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft at Mars during this time, and they will resume in early November.

JPL Newsletter

Earth Seen From Saturn

2006-09-22T09:40:00.000+08:00

This picture was captured by orbiting spacecraft, Cassini.
Click here for image details

Scientists Discover New Ring and Other Features at Saturn

2006-09-20T14:40:00.000+08:00

Saturn sports a new ring in an image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Sunday, Sept. 17, during a one-of-a-kind observation. Other spectacular sights captured by Cassini's cameras include wispy fingers of icy material stretching out tens of thousands of kilometers from the active moon, Enceladus, and a cameo color appearance by planet Earth. The images were obtained during the longest solar occultation of Cassini's four-year mission. During a solar occultation, the sun passes directly behind Saturn, and Cassini lies in the shadow of Saturn while the rings are brilliantly backlit. Usually, an occultation lasts only about an hour, but this time it was a 12-hour marathon. Sunday's occultation allowed Cassini to map the presence of microscopic particles that are not normally visible across the ring system. As a result, Cassini saw the entire inner Saturnian system in a new light.

The new ring is a tenuous feature, visible outside the brighter main rings of Saturn and inside the G and E rings, and coincides with the orbits of Saturn's moons Janus and Epimetheus. Scientists expected that meteoroid impacts on Janus and Epimetheus might kick particles off the moons' surfaces and inject them into Saturn orbit, but they were surprised that a well-defined ring structure exists at this location.

Saturn's extensive, diffuse E ring, the outermost ring, had previously been imaged one small section at a time. The 12-hour marathon enabled scientists to see the entire structure in one view. The moon Enceladus is seen sweeping through the E ring, extending wispy, fingerlike projections into the ring. These very likely consist of tiny ice particles being ejected from Enceladus' south polar geysers, and entering the E-ring.

"Both the new ring and the unexpected structures in the E ring should provide us with important insights into how moons can both release small particles and sculpt their local environments," said Matt Hedman, a research associate working with team member Joseph Burns, an expert in diffuse rings, at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

In the latest observations, scientists once again see the bright ghost-like spokes -- transient, dusty, radial structures -- streaking across the middle of Saturn's main rings.

Capping off the new batch of observations, Cassini cast its powerful eyes in our direction and captured Earth, a pale blue orb, and a faint suggestion of our moon. Not since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth as a pale blue dot from beyond the orbit of Neptune has Earth been imaged in color from the outer solar system.

"Nothing has greater power to alter our perspective of ourselves and our place in the cosmos than these images of Earth we collect from faraway places like Saturn," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute, Boulder , Colo. Porco was one of the Voyager imaging scientists involved in taking the Voyager `Pale Blue Dot' image. "In the end, the ever-widening view of our own little planet against the immensity of space is perhaps the greatest legacy of all our interplanetary travels."

In the coming weeks, several science teams will analyze data collected by Cassini's other instruments during this rare occultation event. The data will help scientists better understand the relationship between the rings and moons, and will give mission planners a clearer picture of ring hazards to avoid during future ring crossings.

Images of the new ring, the E-ring, Enceladus and Earth are available at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org

JPL News Release

Pluto is Now the Asteroid Number 134340

2006-09-13T18:20:00.000+08:00

Pluto has got a new name. The asteroid number 134340 is now the official name of the former 9th planet. It was assigned by the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the organization responsible for collecting data about asteroids and comets in our solar system. Pluto's companion satellites, Charon, Nix and Hydra are considered part of the same system and will not be assigned separate asteroid numbers, said MPC director emeritus Brian Marsden. Instead, they will be called 134340 I, II and III, respectively.

There are currently 136,563 asteroid objects recognized by the MPC; 2,224 new objects were added last week, of which Pluto was the first.

More story...

Spitzer Digs Up Troves of Possible Solar Systems in Orion

2006-08-15T15:22:00.000+08:00

Astronomers have long scrutinized the vast and layered clouds of the Orion nebula, an industrious star-making factory visible to the naked eye in the sword of the famous hunter constellation. Yet, Orion is still full of secrets. A new image from Spitzer Space Telescope probes deep into the clouds of dust that permeate the nebula and its surrounding regions. The striking false-color picture shows pinkish swirls of dust speckled with stars, some of which are orbited by disks of planet-forming dust.

The image can be seen by visiting: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2006-16/ssc2006-16a.shtml .

Spitzer, with its powerful infrared vision, was able to unearth nearly 2,300 such planet-forming disks in the Orion cloud complex, a collection of turbulent star-forming clouds that includes the well-known Orion nebula. The disks, made of gas and dust that whirl around young suns, are too small and distant to be seen by visible-light telescopes; however, the infrared glow of their warm dust is easily spotted by Spitzer's infrared detectors. Each disk has the potential to form planets and its own solar system.

A look at Orion's demographics reveals that the potential solar systems populate a variety of environments. Megeath and his colleagues found that about 60 percent of the disk-sporting stars in the Orion cloud complex inhabit its bustling "cities," or clusters, containing hundreds of young stars. About 15 percent reside in small outer communities, and a surprising 25 percent prefer to go it alone, living in isolation. Prior to the Spitzer observations, scientists thought that up to 90 percent of young stars, both with and without disks, dwelled in cities like those of Orion. Astronomers do not know whether our middle-aged sun grew up in the stellar equivalent of the city or countryside, though most favor a large city scenario. Newborn stars like the ones in Orion tend to drift away from their siblings over time, so it is hard to trace an adult star's origins. Megeath and his colleagues estimate that about 60 to 70 percent of the stars in the Orion cloud complex have disks.

Spitzer's infrared vision also dug up 200 stellar embryos in the Orion cloud complex, most of which had never been seen before. Stellar embryos are still too young to have developed disks. The Orion cloud complex is about 1,450 light-years from Earth and spans about 240 light-years of space. Spitzer's wide field of view allowed it to survey most of the complex, an area of the sky equivalent to 28 full moons. The featured image shows a slice of this survey, the equivalent of four full moons-worth of sky, and includes the Orion nebula itself.

NASA's Spitzer Newsletter

Cassini Sees Lakes on Titan

2006-07-26T15:29:00.000+08:00

The Cassini spacecraft, using its radar system, has discovered very strong evidence for hydrocarbon lakes on Titan. Dark patches, which resemble terrestrial lakes, seem to be sprinkled all over the high latitudes surrounding Titan's north pole.
Scientists have speculated that liquid methane or ethane might form lakes on Titan, particularly near the somewhat colder polar regions. In the images, a variety of dark patches, some with channels leading in or out of them, appear. The channels have a shape that strongly implies they were carved by liquid. Some of the dark patches and connecting channels are completely black, that is, they reflect back essentially no radar signal, and hence must be extremely smooth. In some cases rims can be seen around the dark patches, suggesting deposits that might form as liquid evaporates. The abundant methane in Titan's atmosphere is stable as a liquid under Titan conditions, as is its abundant chemical product, ethane, but liquid water is not. For all these reasons, scientists interpret the dark areas as lakes of liquid methane or ethane, making Titan the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to possess lakes. Because such lakes may wax and wane over time, and winds may alter the roughness of their surfaces. Repeat coverage of these areas should test whether indeed these are bodies of liquid.

View the image pictured by Cassini

Young Jupiter-sized Planet with Its Disk Discovered

2006-06-06T20:01:00.000+08:00

Direct evidence that a gas giant planet forms its moons from a disk of dust and scattered rocks from a leftover of its planetary system formation was discovered by a team of astronomers. The object, called 2M1207B, was found to circle a brown dwarf and lies 170 lights year from Earth in the Constellation Centaurus. The presence of disk around the planet was inferred from the observation of temperatures of the two objects. the brown dwarf has a mass of about 25 Jupiters and a temperature of 4100 degrees Fahrenheit (2600 K). Its companion 2M1207B weighs about 8 times Jupiter and has a temperature of 2400 degrees F (1600 K). Both objects are warm due to their young age of 5-10 million years, having retained the heat of formation. Given those temperatures, the team then calculated the expected brightness of both objects. The brown dwarf matched predictions but its companion was about 8 times fainter than expected. After examining several potential causes, the team concluded that the only plausible explanation was the presence of an edge-on dusty disk that blocked most of the planet's light.

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New Potrait of Andromeda Releases by NASA

2006-06-06T19:54:00.000+08:00

The Andromeda galaxy, named for the mythological princess who almost fell prey to a sea monster, appears tranquil in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The mesmerizing infrared mosaic shows red waves of dust over a blue sea of stars.

"What's really interesting about this view is the contrast between the galaxy's smooth, flat disk of old stars and its bumpy waves of dust heated by young stars," said Dr. Pauline Barmby of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. Barmby and her colleagues recently observed Andromeda using Spitzer.

To view the picture, click here

Barmby and her team used the Spitzer data to make drastically improved measurements of Andromeda's infrared brightness. They found that the galaxy shines with the same amount of energy as about 4 billion suns. Based on these measurements, the astronomers confirmed that there are roughly 1 trillion stars in the galaxy. Our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to house a couple of hundred billion stars.
The new false-colored portrait also provides astronomers with the best look yet at the dust-drenched spiral arms that swirl out of the galaxy's center, a region hidden by bright starlight in visible-light images. Dust and gas are the building materials of stars. They are clumped together throughout the spiral arms, where new stars are forming.

The Andromeda galaxy, also known by astronomers as Messier 31, is located 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. It is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way, making it the ideal specimen for carefully examining the nature of galaxies. On a clear, dark night, the galaxy can be spotted with the naked eye as a fuzzy blob.

Source: JPL NewsLetter

Three Neptune-sized Planets Around a Nearby Star Discovered

2006-05-19T21:12:00.001+08:00

A new planetary system was discovered by Eropean astronomers by using the ultra-precise HARPS spectrograph on ESO's 3.6-m telescope at La Silla (Chile). Three Neptune-size planets were detected orbiting its parent star, HD 69830. The discovery also reveals the planetary system enriched with asteroid belt. The parent star is located just 41 light-years away towards the constellation of Puppis (the Stern), it is, with a visual magnitude of 5.95, just visible with the unaided eye.

The newly found planets have minimum masses between 10 and 18 times the mass of the Earth. Extensive theoretical simulations favour an essentially rocky composition for the inner planet, and a rocky/gas structure for the middle one. The outer planet has probably accreted some ice during its formation, and is likely to be made of a rocky/ icy core surrounded by a quite massive envelope. Further calculations have also shown that the system is in a dynamically stable configuration.

The outer planet also appears to be located near the inner edge of the habitable zone, where liquid water can exist at the surface of rocky/icy bodies. Although this planet is probably not Earth-like due to its heavy mass, its discovery opens the way to exciting perspectives.

Source: European Southern Observatory News Release

Spitzer Telescope Sees Trail of Comet Crumbs

2006-05-11T16:13:00.000+08:00

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has snapped a picture of the bits and pieces making up Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3, which is continuing to break apart on its periodic journey around the sun. The new infrared view shows several chunks of the comet riding along its own dusty trail of crumbs.

The picture can be viewed at here

Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 consists of a collection of fragments that file along like ducks in a row around the sun every 5.4 years. This year, the bunch will pass by Earth beginning on May 12 before swinging by the sun on June 6. The fragments won't get too close to Earth, about 7.3 million miles, or 30 times the distance between Earth and the moon, but they should be visible through binoculars in the countryside night skies.

During the past six weeks, amateur and professional astronomers have been watching the comet fall apart before their telescopes' eyes. Spitzer viewed the broken comet from its quiet perch up in space May 4 to May 6, covering a portion of the sky that allowed it to spot 45 of the 58 known fragments.

Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 should be dimly visible through binoculars on a clear night between the Cygnus and Pegasus constellations from May 12 to May 28.

More info at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/24mar_73p.htm

Source: Spitzer New Release

Cassini Measures Length of Saturn Day

2006-05-06T14:00:00.000+08:00

We all know Earth rotates every 24 hours, but scientists have long had difficulty pinpointing how long the day is on Saturn. The magnetometer onboard the Cassini spacecraft has, for the first time ever, measured a periodic signal in Saturn's magnetic field, key information to finally understanding the length of a Saturn day and the evolution of this gaseous planet.

The latest research suggests a Saturn day is 10 hours, 47 minutes, 6 seconds (plus or minus 40 seconds). That is 8 minutes slower than NASA Voyager results from the early 1980s, and slower than previous estimates from another Cassini instrument. The magnetometer results provide the best estimate of the Saturn day to date, because it can see deep inside Saturn. These Cassini results are in the May 4 issue of the journal Nature.

Source: JPL News Release

Planets Forming Region Around A Dead Star Found by Spitzer

2006-04-06T12:17:00.000+08:00

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has uncovered new evidence that planets might rise up out of a dead star's ashes. The infrared telescope surveyed the scene around a pulsar, the remnant of an exploded star, and found a surrounding disk made up of debris shot out during the star's death throes. The dusty rubble in this disk might ultimately stick together to form planets. This is the first time scientists have detected planet-building materials around a star that died in a fiery blast.

The pulsar observed by Spitzer, named 4U 0142+61, is 13,000 light-years
away in the Cassiopeia constellation. It was once a large, bright star
with a mass between 10 and 20 times that of our sun. The star probably
survived for about 10 million years, until it collapsed under its own
weight about 100,000 years ago and blasted apart in a supernova explosion.

Source: Spitzer News Release

NASA Releases New Maps of Jupiter

2006-04-02T17:21:00.000+08:00

The US space agency (Nasa) has released the most detailed colour maps of the planet Jupiter ever produced. The stunning maps were pieced together by researchers from images taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it approached Jupiter on 11 and 12 December 2000.

Raw images exist in only two colours so the maps were coloured to show how Jupiter would appear to the naked eye.They consist of one cylindrical map of the planet along with north and south polar maps of Jupiter.

The maps were created from 36 frames captured by Cassini as it passed the giant planet on a gravity assist manoeuvre to get it to Saturn. Cassini arrived in Saturn orbit on 1 July 2004.

News Source: BBC

What a Strange Looking Nebula

2006-03-16T21:10:00.000+08:00

An unprecedented double helix nebula was spotted by NASA's Infrared Spitzer Telescope. It lies in the center of our galaxy, and is located about 300 light years from gigantic black hole of the galactic center. Earth lies 25,000 away from it. The nebula spans 80 light years. The shape of nebula is different from most known nebula in cosmic realm. The structure looks like a DNA molecule, two intertwining strands wrapped around each other as seen in the picture below.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

New Icy Super Earth Discovered

2006-03-14T19:40:00.000+08:00

A "Super Earth" that weighs 13 times as much as our planet was discovered by an international collaboration of astronomers. The new planet is orbiting a red dwarf from a cold outer region of the system. The Neptune-sized planet has a frigid surface temperature measuring at -330 degrees Fahrenheit, it's one of the coldest planets ever discovered outside our solar system. The distant system lies 9,000 light years away and found by observing a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. It is when a massive object such as a star crosses in front of another distant star. The object's strong gravity bends the light rays from the more distant star and magnifies them like a lens. Here on Earth, we see the magnified star get brighter as the lens star crosses in front of it, and then fade as the lens gets farther away.

As pointed by Andrew Gould, leader of the MicroFUN collaboration and professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, the finding of the new icy planet outside our solar system has suggested that these icy super-Earths are pretty common and are three times more common than Jupiter-sized planets.

Full Story

Mars Orbiter Reaches the Red Planet

2006-03-11T10:44:00.000+08:00

The Mars Recconaissance Orbiter (MRO) successfully enters Mars orbit in elliptical path, ending the tension among mission team for dealing with the MRO's critical phase. The Mars probe is now undertaking orbit adjustment called "aerobraking" to put itself in a circular orbit and reaches the targeted altitude that ranging from 320 kilometers (199 miles) to 255 kilometers (158 miles), which is lower than any other Mars probes currently orbitting the red planet. This process takes for 6 months. The probe's scientific study on Mars will commence in November 2006.

Launched in August 2005, MRO traveled about 500 million kms (310 million miles) to reach Mars. The spacecraft carries six scientific instruments that will study Mars's surface and atmosphere in unprecedented detail.

More info on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can be found here at www.nasa.gov/mro

Potential Liquid Water Discovered on Enceladus

2006-03-10T12:26:00.000+08:00

I've just received a newsletter from NASA/JPL and here's the shocking news. The Saturn's moon of Enceladus could have reservoirs of liquid water! That means there could be a potential living organism lurking on the icy moon (and this is my hasty conclusion). Data from Cassini spacecraft that orbitting the ringed planet have indicated the evidence of icy jets and towering plumes ejecting large quantities of particles at high speed. The possibility is that the jets might be erupting from near-surface pockets of liquid water above 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), like cold versions of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone.

Scientists have long been baffled by the presence of oxygen atoms in the Saturnian system, now that oddity is explained by this finding. Enceladus is spewing out water molecules, which break down into oxygen and hydrogen. I think that this is another supporting evidence for the existance of liquid water on the moon. With this finding, Enceladus surely becomes one the most exciting places in solar system, waiting for the next big scrutiny and another NASA's prime mission targets after Europa, Titan and Triton.

Read the press release by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for details
Image credit: NASA