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    Category Astronomy/Space

    New Evidence for Liquid Water Beneath the South Polar Ice Cap of Mars

    September 30, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    New evidence for liquid water beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars
    The left-hand panel shows the surface topography of Mars’s south pole, with the outline of the south polar cap in black. The light blue line shows the area used in the modelling experiments, and the green square shows the region containing the inferred subglacial water. The ice in the region is around 1500 m thick. The right-hand panel shows the surface undulation identified by the Cambridge-led research team. It is visible as the red area, which is elevated by 5-8 m above the regional topography, with a smaller depression (2-4 m below the regional topography) upstream (towards the top right of the image). The black outline shows the area of water as inferred by the orbiting radar. Credit: University of Cambridge

    An international team of researchers has revealed new evidence for the ...

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    Hubble Detects Protective Shield Defending a Pair of Dwarf Galaxies

    September 29, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Hubble detects protective shield defending a pair of dwarf galaxies
    Credit: NASA

    For billions of years, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies—the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet—to the puzzlement of astronomers—these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation.

    “A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”

    With the help of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a retired satellite called the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), a t...

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    Zhurong Rover finds evidence of possible Flooding on Mars Billions of Years ago

    September 28, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Zhurong rover finds evidence of possible flooding on Mars billions of years ago
    Region around the Zhurong rover landing site. a, Topographic map showing the landing site of Zhurong (red star), as well as the landing sites of the Phoenix, InSight, Curiosity, Perseverance and Viking-2 landers/rovers (orange squares). The purple solid and dashed lines show the locations of Martian palaeoshorelines of ref. 11, roughly delineating the depositional contact of the VBF in the northern plains. b, Simplified geological map near the Zhurong landing site with data from ref. 18. Scale bar, 200 km. c, Geomorphic map of the Zhurong landing area with data from ref. 22. Scale bar, 15 km. d, Traverse of the Zhurong rover from 25 May (Sol 11) to 6 September (Sol 113) 2021 on the basemap of a Tianwen-1 High Resolution Imaging Camera image (Sol 19, 2 June 2021)...
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    Synthetic Lava in Lab Aids Exoplanet Exploration

    September 28, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Exoplanet illustration
    In this illustration, exoplanet CoRoT-7b, which is likely five times the mass of Earth, may well be full of lava landscapes and boiling oceans. European Southern Observatory / L. Calçada

    The exploration era for the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is getting hot—volcanically hot.

    A multidisciplinary group of Cornell researchers has modeled and synthesized lava in the laboratory as the kinds of rock that may form on far-away exoplanets. They developed 16 types of surface compositions as a starter catalog for finding volcanic worlds that feature fiery landscapes and oceans of magma.

    Their research, “Volcanic Exoplanet Surfaces,” was published in the forthcoming November 2022 edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

    “We have synthesized compositions t...

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