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    Category Astronomy/Space

    What happens to Interstellar Objects Captured By the Solar System?

    September 29, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This figure from the study shows some simulation results. Each blue line is an individual ISO. The top represents the osculating pericenter distance in AUs. The bottom shows inclination in degrees. In their simulations, individual objects don't become distinguishable until after about 100 million years. When a blue line ends, that ISO has left the Solar System. Image Credit: Napier et al 2021.
    This figure from the study shows some simulation results. Each blue line is an individual ISO. The top represents the osculating pericenter distance in AUs. The bottom shows inclination in degrees. In their simulations, individual objects don’t become distinguishable until after about 100 million years. When a blue line ends, that ISO has left the Solar System. Image Credit: Napier et al 2021.

    Now that we know that interstellar objects (ISOs) visit our solar system, scientists are keen to understand them better. How could they be captured? If they’re captured, what happens to them? How many of them might be in our solar system?

    One team of researchers is trying to find answers.

    We know of two ISOs for certain: “Oumuamua and comet2I/Borisov...

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    Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are Speeding up

    September 29, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Like the speed of an advancing race car driver, the winds in the outermost “lane” of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are accelerating – a discovery only made possible by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has monitored the planet for more than a decade.

    Researchers analyzing Hubble’s regular “storm reports” found that the average wind speed just within the boundaries of the storm, known as a high-speed ring, has increased by up to 8 percent from 2009 to 2020. In contrast, the winds near the red spot’s innermost region are moving significantly more slowly, like someone cruising lazily on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

    The massive storm’s crimson-colored clouds spin counterclockwise at speeds that exceed 400 miles per hour – and the vortex is bigger than Earth itself...

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    Earth and Venus grew up as Rambunctious Planets

    September 28, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Simulated aftermath of a hit-and-run collisions between the young Earth and another planetary body
    The moon is thought to be the aftermath of a giant impact. According to a new theory, there were two giant impacts in a row, separated by about 1 million years, involving a Mars-sized ‘Theia’ and proto-Earth. In this image, the proposed hit-and-run collision is simulated in 3D, shown about an hour after impact. A cut-away view shows the iron cores. Theia (or most of it) barely escapes, so a follow-on collision is likely.A. Emsenhuber/University of Bern/University of Munich

    Using machine learning and simulations of giant impacts, researchers found that the planets residing in the inner solar system were likely born from repeated hit-and-run collisions, challenging conventional models of planet formation.

    Planet formation — the process by which neat, round, distinct planets form from ...

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    Hubble finds Early, Massive Galaxies Running on Empty

    September 25, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    These images are composites from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The boxed and pullout images show two of the six, distant, massive galaxies where scientists found star formation has ceased due to the depletion of a fuel source – cold hydrogen gas. Hubble, together with ALMA, found these odd galaxies when they combined forces with the “natural lens” in space created by foreground massive galaxy clusters. The clusters’ gravity stretches and amplifies the light of the background galaxies in an effect called gravitational lensing. This phenomenon allows astronomers to use massive galaxy clusters as natural magnifying glasses to study details in the distant galaxies that would otherwise be impossible to see...
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