Recent Comments

    Category Astronomy/Space

    Pluto’s Icy Heart Makes Winds Blow

    February 6, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Four images from NASA’s New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this global view of Pluto.
    Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

    A “beating heart” of frozen nitrogen controls Pluto’s winds and may give rise to features on its surface, according to a new study.

    Pluto’s famous heart-shaped structure, named Tombaugh Regio, quickly became famous after NASA’s New Horizons mission captured footage of the dwarf planet in 2015 and revealed it isn’t the barren world scientists thought it was.

    Now, new research shows Pluto’s renowned nitrogen heart rules its atmospheric circulation...

    Read More

    Low-Energy Solar Particles from beyond Earth found near the Sun

    February 4, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben Using data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, an SwRI-led team identified low-energy particles, the smoking gun pointing to interactions between slow- and fast-moving regions of the solar wind accelerating high-energy particles from beyond the orbit of Earth. Using Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (IS☉IS) instrument data, they measured low-energy particles in the near-Sun environment that had likely traveled back toward the Sun, slowing against the tide of the solar wind while still retaining surprising energies.

    Particles are smoking gun for solar wind interactions beyond Earth orbit...

    Read More

    Astronomers witness the Dragging of Space-Time in Stellar Cosmic Dance

    February 4, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s depiction of ‘frame-dragging’: two spinning stars twisting space and time. Credit: Mark Myers, OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence.

    An international team of astrophysicists led by Australian Professor Matthew Bailes, from the ARC Centre of Excellence of Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), has shown exciting new evidence for ‘frame-dragging’—how the spinning of a celestial body twists space and time—after tracking the orbit of an exotic stellar pair for almost two decades. The data, which is further evidence for Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, is published today the journal Science.

    More than a century ago, Albert Einstein published his iconic theory of General Relativity—that the force of gravity arises from the curvature of space and time and that objects, su...

    Read More

    Newest Solar Telescope produces First Images

    February 1, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Cell-like structures on the surface of the sun
    The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution image of the sun’s surface ever taken. In this picture, taken at 789 nanometers (nm), we can see features as small as 30km (18 miles) in size for the first time ever. The image shows a pattern of turbulent, “boiling” gas that covers the entire sun. The cell-like structures — each about the size of Texas — are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface. Hot solar material (plasma) rises in the bright centers of “cells,” cools off and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection. In these dark lanes we can also see the tiny, bright markers of magnetic fields...
    Read More