Category Astronomy/Space

SwRI scientist studied the binary asteroid Patroclus-Menoetius, shown in this artist’s conception, to determine that a shake-up of the giant planets likely happened early in the solar system’s history, within the first 100 million years.
Credit: Image Courtesy of W.M. Keck Observatory/Lynette Cook

Asteroid pair is the ‘smoking gun’ indicating an earlier altercation amongst the giants. Scientists at Southwest Research Institute studied an unusual pair of asteroids and discovered that their existence points to an early planetary rearrangement in our solar system.

These bodies, called Patroclus and Menoetius, are targets of NASA’s upcoming Lucy mission. They are around 70 miles wide and orbit around each other as they collectively circle the Sun...

Artist impression of an outflow of molecular gas from an active star-forming galaxy.
Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, D. Berry

For the first time, a powerful “wind” of molecules has been detected in a galaxy located 12 billion light-years away. Probing a time when the universe was less than 10 percent of its current age, University of Texas at Austin astronomer Justin Spilker’s research sheds light on how the earliest galaxies regulated the birth of stars to keep from blowing themselves apart. The research will appear in the Sept. 7 issue of the journal Science. “Galaxies are complicated, messy beasts, and we think outflows and winds are critical pieces to how they form and evolve, regulating their ability to grow,” Spilker said.

Some galaxies such as the Milky Way and Andromeda have relatively slow a...

A size comparison of the Earth, Wolf 503b and Neptune. The color blue for Wolf 503b is imaginary; nothing is yet known about the atmosphere or surface of the planet.
Credit: NASA Goddard/Robert Simmon (Earth), NASA/JPL (Neptune)

Twice size of Earth, Wolf 503b orbits star every six days and was discovered by an international team of Canadian, American and German researchers using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The find is described in a new study whose lead author is Merrin Peterson, an Institute for research on exoplanets (iREx) graduate student who started her master’s degree at Université de Montréal (UdeM) in May.

Wolf 503b is about 145 light years from Earth in the Virgo constellation; it orbits its star every six days and is thus very close to it, about 10 times closer than...

Saturn’s northern polar hexagon.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Hampton University

The long-lived international Cassini mission has revealed a surprising feature emerging at Saturn’s northern pole as it nears summertime: a warming, high-altitude vortex with a hexagonal shape, akin to the famous hexagon seen deeper down in Saturn’s clouds. This suggests that the lower-altitude hexagon may influence what happens up above, and that it could be a towering structure spanning hundreds of kilometres in height.

When Cassini arrived at the Saturnian system in 2004, the southern hemisphere was enjoying summertime, while the northern was in the midst of winter. The spacecraft spied a broad, warm, high-altitude vortex at Saturn’s southern pole, but none at the planet’s northern pole.

A new long-term stud...