Category Astronomy/Space

This is a mosaic image of Mars created from over 100 images taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s.
Credit: NASA

A similar process could occur anywhere that igneous rocks are surrounded by brines, including the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Mars’ organic carbon may have originated from a series of electrochemical reactions between briny liquids and volcanic minerals, according to new analyses of three Martian meteorites from a team led by Carnegie’s Andrew Steele published in Science Advances.

The group’s analysis of a trio of Martian meteorites that fell to Earth – Tissint, Nakhla, and NWA 1950 – showed that they contain an inventory of organic carbon that is remarkably consistent with the organic carbon compounds detected by the Mars Science Labora...

Payload of the sounding rocket and all those involved in the undertaking, among them scientists of the MAIUS-1 project, employees of the German Aerospace Center, and employees of the Esrange rocket launch site.
Credit: Copyright Thomas Schleuss, DLR

Physicists put in place groundwork for accurately testing Einstein’s equivalence principle. A team of scientists from Germany has succeeded in creating a Bose-Einstein condensate for the first time in space on board a research rocket. On January 23, 2017 at 3:30 a.m. Central European Time, the MAIUS-1 mission was launched into space from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. After a detailed analysis, the results have been published recently in the journal Nature...

N-body simulation of the merger of a Milky Way-like galaxy (with its stars in blue) and a smaller disky galaxy resembling the Small Magellanic Cloud in mass (with it stars in red). At the beginning, the two galaxies are clearly separated, but gravity pulls them together and this leads to the full accretion of the smaller one. Distinguishing the accreted stars from the rest is not easy by the final stage, but it is possible using the motions of the stars and their chemical composition. Credit
Credit: H.H. Koppelman, A. Villalobos, A. Helmi (University of Groningen)

Some ten billion years ago, the Milky Way merged with a large galaxy. The stars from this partner, named Gaia-Enceladus, make up most of the Milky Way’s halo and also shaped its thick disk, giving it its inflated form...

An artist’s illustration of what Phaeton might look like up close.
Credit: Heather Roper

Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated (3200) Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought.

Kareta presented the results during a press conference on Oct. 23 at the 50th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in Knoxville, Tennessee. Using telescopes in Hawaii and Arizona, the team studied sunlight reflected off Phaethon, which is known to be blue in color...