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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Mars Moon got its Grooves from Rolling Stones

    November 21, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Much of Phobos' surface is covered with strange linear grooves. New research bolsters that idea the boulders blasted free from Stickney crater (the large depression on the right) carved those iconic grooves. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

    Much of Phobos’ surface is covered with strange linear grooves. New research bolsters that idea the boulders blasted free from Stickney crater (the large depression on the right) carved those iconic grooves.
    Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

    A new study bolsters the idea that strange grooves crisscrossing the surface of the Martian moon Phobos were made by rolling boulders blasted free from an ancient asteroid impact. The research, published in Planetary and Space Science, uses computer models to simulate the movement of debris from Stickney crater, a huge gash on one end of Phobos’ oblong body. The models show that boulders rolling across the surface in the aftermath of the Stickney impact could have created the puzzling patterns of grooves seen on Phobos today.

    “These grooves...

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    Astronomers discover Giant Relic of Disrupted ‘Tadpole’ Galaxy

    November 20, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    HCG 98 from the deep r image of the IAC Stripe 82 Project (Fliri & Trujillo 2016). The image has been contrast-stretched and is presented here with a logarithmic look-up table to emphasize faint features. Equatorial J2000 coordinates set the scale of this image, which has north to the top and west to the right.

    Discovery illuminates how and why galaxies disappear. A team of astronomers from Israel, the United States and Russia has identified a disrupted galaxy resembling a giant tadpole, complete with an elliptical head and a long, straight tail, about 300 million light years away from Earth. The galaxy is 1 million light-years long from end to end, 10 times longer than the Milky Way. “We have found a giant, exceptional relic of a disrupted galaxy,” says Dr...

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    Overflowing Crater Lakes Carved Canyons across Mars

    November 19, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Jezero crater is a paleolake and potential landing site for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission to look for past life. The outlet canyon carved by overflow flooding is visible in the upper right side of the crater. Ancient rivers carved the inlets on the right side of the crater.
    Credit: NASA/Tim Goudge

    Today, most of the water on Mars is locked away in frozen ice caps. But billions of years ago it flowed freely across the surface, forming rushing rivers that emptied into craters, forming lakes and seas. New research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found evidence that sometimes the lakes would take on so much water that they overflowed and burst from the sides of their basins, creating catastrophic floods that carved canyons very rapidly, perhaps in a matter of weeks.

    The findings...

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    Astronomers find possible Elusive Star behind Supernova

    November 18, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This is an artist's concept of a blue supergiant star that once existed inside a cluster of young stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 3938, located 65 million light-years away. It exploded as a supernova in 2017, and Hubble Space Telescope archival photos were used to locate the doomed progenitor star, as it looked in 2007. The star may have been as massive as 50 suns and burned at a furious rate, making it hotter and bluer than our Sun. It was so hot, it had lost its outer layers of hydrogen and helium. When it exploded in 2017, astronomers categorized it as a Type Ic supernova because of the lack of hydrogen and helium in the supernova's spectrum. In an alternative scenario (not shown here) a binary companion to the massive star may have stripped off its hydrogen and helium layers. Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI)

    This is an artist’s concept of a blue supergiant star that once existed inside a cluster of young stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 3938, located 65 million light-years away. It exploded as a supernova in 2017, and Hubble Space Telescope archival photos were used to locate the doomed progenitor star, as it looked in 2007. The star may have been as massive as 50 suns and burned at a furious rate, making it hotter and bluer than our Sun. It was so hot, it had lost its outer layers of hydrogen and helium. When it exploded in 2017, astronomers categorized it as a Type Ic supernova because of the lack of hydrogen and helium in the supernova’s spectrum. In an alternative scenario (not shown here) a binary companion to the massive star may have stripped off its hydrogen and helium layers.
    Credits: NA...

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