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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Citizen scientist finds ancient White Dwarf star encircled by Puzzling Rings

    February 24, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    illustration of white dwarf LSPM J0207+3331
    In this illustration, an asteroid (bottom left) breaks apart under the powerful gravity of LSPM J0207+3331, the oldest, coldest white dwarf known to be surrounded by a ring of dusty debris. Scientists think the system’s infrared signal is best explained by two distinct rings composed of dust supplied by crumbling asteroids.
    Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

    A volunteer working with the NASA-led Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project has found the oldest and coldest known white dwarf – an Earth-sized remnant of a Sun-like star that has died – ringed by dust and debris. Astronomers suspect this could be the first known white dwarf with multiple dust rings.

    The star, LSPM J0207+3331 or J0207 for short, is forcing researchers to reconsider models of planetary syst...

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    Ingredients for Water could be made on Surface of Moon, a chemical factory

    February 24, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Waxing gibbous moon.
    Credit: Ernie Wright / NASA

    When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the Moon’s surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the Moon’s surface in ingredients that could make water, NASA scientists have found.

    Using a computer program, scientists simulated the chemistry that unfolds when the solar wind pelts the Moon’s surface. As the Sun streams protons to the Moon, they found, those particles interact with electrons in the lunar surface, making hydrogen (H) atoms. These atoms then migrate through the surface and latch onto the abundant oxygen (O) atoms bound in the silica (SiO2) and other oxygen-bearing molecules that make up the lunar soil, or regolith...

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    Earth may be 140 years away from reaching Carbon Levels Not Seen in 56 million years

    February 23, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A model for carbon accumulation over time as the sum of carbon emissions, based on the steady increase in emissions and emission rates since 1959. Red circles are annual accumulations through 2015. If the recent trend in emissions continues, we can expect to reach the minimum estimate for PETM-scale carbon accumulation in the year 2159 and the maximum estimate for PETM-scale carbon accumulation in the year 2278.
    Credit: AGU/Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology/Gingerich 2019.

    Total human carbon dioxide emissions could match those of Earth’s last major greenhouse warming event in fewer than five generations, new research finds...

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    Tiny Neptune Moon Spotted by Hubble may have Broken from Larger Moon

    February 22, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An artist’s concept of the tiny moon Hippocamp that was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. Only 20 miles across, it may actually be a broken-off fragment from a much larger neighboring moon, Proteus, seen as a crescent in the background. This is the first evidence for a moon being an offshoot from a comet collision with a much larger parent body.
    Credit: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)

    Astronomers call it “the moon that shouldn’t be there.” After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.

    The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, is unusually close to a much larger Neptunian moon called Proteus...

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