Category Astronomy/Space

Titan’s winter polar vortex imaged by the Cassini Spacecraft’s ISS camera. The vortex is now in deep winter and can only be seen because the polar clouds within the vortex extend high above Titan’s surface into the sunlight. The vortex was extremely cold from 2012-2015 giving rise to unusual nitrile ice clouds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Jason Major

A new study led by a University of Bristol earth scientist has shown that recently reported unexpected behaviour on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is due to its unique atmospheric chemistry. Titan’s polar atmosphere recently experiences and unexpected and significant cooling, contrary to all model predictions and differing from the behaviour of all other terrestrial planets in our solar system.

Titan is the largest moo...

Moon crust formation graphic. Credit: The University of Texas at Austin/Jackson School of Geosciences

A team led by The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences took to the lab to recreate the magmatic melt that once formed the lunar surface and uncovered new insights on how the modern moonscape came to be. Their study shows that the Moon’s crust initially formed from rock floating to the surface of the magma ocean and cooling. However, the team also found that one of the great mysteries of the lunar body’s formation – how it could develop a crust composed of just one mineral – cannot be explained by the initial crust formation and must have been the result of some secondary event.

“It’s fascinating to me that there could be a body as big as the Moon that was completely ...

Physicists at MIT have designed a pocket-sized cosmic ray muon detector to track these ghostly particles. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

Pocket-sized device detects charged particles in surrounding air. At any given moment, Earth’s atmosphere is showered with high-energy cosmic rays that have been blasted from supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena far beyond the Solar System. When cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they decay into muons – charged particles that are slightly heavier than an electron. Muons last only fractions of a second, and during their fleeting lifespan they can be found through every layer of Earth’s atmosphere, circulating in the air around us and raining onto the surface at a rate similar to a light drizzle...

The Milky Way…..The Solar Neighborhood. XLII. Parallax Results from the CTIOPI 0.9 m Program—Identifying New Nearby Subdwarfs Using Tangential Velocities and Locations on the H–R Diagram. The Astronomical Journal, 2017; 154 (5): 191 DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aa8b64

Astronomers have discovered some of the oldest stars in our Milky Way galaxy by determining their locations and velocities, according to a study led by scientists at Georgia State University. Just like humans, stars have a life span: birth, youth, adulthood, senior and death. This study focused on old or “senior citizen” stars, also known as cool subdwarfs, that are much older and cooler in temperature than the sun.

The Milky Way is nearly 14 billion years old, and its oldest stars developed in the early stage of the galaxy’s f...