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    Category Astronomy/Space

    NASA’s SOFIA discovers Water on Sunlit Surface of Moon

    October 27, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration highlights the Moon’s Clavius Crater with an illustration depicting water trapped in the lunar soil there, along with an image of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) that found sunlit lunar water.
    Credits: NASA/Daniel Rutter

    NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.

    SOFIA has detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere...

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    Galactic Archaeology

    October 24, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    ‘Galactic archaeology’ refers to the study of second generation stars to learn about the physical characteristics of the first stars, which disappeared only tens of millions of years after the Big Bang. A computational physics study modeled for the first time faint supernovae of metal-free first stars, yielding carbon-enhanced abundance patterns for star formation. Slice of density, temperature, and carbon abundance for a 13 solar mass progenitor model at times (left-right) 0.41, 15.22, and 29.16 million years after the supernovae explosion in a box with a side 2 kpc. Credit: Chiaki, et al.

    Supercomputers dig into first star fossils...

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    ALMA shows Volcanic Impact on Io’s Atmosphere

    October 23, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), I. de Pater et al.; NRAO/AUI NSF, S. Dagnello; NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

    New radio images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show for the first time the direct effect of volcanic activity on the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Io.

    Io is the most volcanically active moon in our solar system. It hosts more than 400 active volcanoes, spewing out sulfur gases that give Io its yellow-white-orange-red colors when they freeze out on its surface.

    Although it is extremely thin — about a billion times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere — Io has an atmosphere that can teach us about Io’s volcanic activity and provide us a window into the exotic moon’s interior and what is happening below its colorful crust.

    Previous research has sh...

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    Ultraviolet shines light on Origins of the Solar System

    October 22, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist rendition of the protosun and the solar nebula. Oxygen isotopes can be altered by ultraviolet light (gold arrows). Short-lived radiogenic isotopes of aluminum (maroon wavy arrows) may also have been injected into the solar nebula. Insets: electron backscatter images from calcium-aluminum inclusions and the approximate location at which these high-temperature condensates formed.

    Credit: NASA JPL-Caltech/Lyons/ASU

    In the search to discover the origins of our solar system, an international team including planetary scientists has compared the composition of the sun to the composition of the most ancient materials that formed in our solar system: refractory inclusions in unmetamorphosed meteorites.

    By analyzing the oxygen isotopes (varieties of an element that have some extra neutr...

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