Category Astronomy/Space

The NASA-funded FOXSI instrument captured new evidence of small solar flares, called nanoflares, during its December 2014 flight on a suborbital sounding rocket. Nanoflares could help explain why the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, is so much hotter than the surface. Here, FOXSI’s observations of hard X-rays are shown in blue, superimposed over a soft X-ray image of the Sun from JAXA and NASA’s Hinode solar-observing satellite. Credit: JAXA/NASA/Hinode/FOXSI

Like most solar sounding rockets, the second flight of the FOXSI instrument – short for Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager – lasted 15 minutes, with just 6 minutes of data collection...

This image shows V1247 Orionis, a young, hot star surrounded by a dynamic ring of gas and dust, known as a circumstellar disc. The disc can be seen in two parts: a clearly defined central ring of matter and a more delicate crescent structure located further out. Credit: Stefan Kraus

The quest to discover how planets found in the far reaches of the universe are born has taken a new, crucial twist. A new study by an international team of scientists, led by Stefan Kraus from the University of Exeter, has given a fascinating new insight into one of the most respected theories of how planets are formed. Young stars start out with a massive disk of gas and dust that over time, astronomers think, either diffuses away or coalesces into planets and asteroids.

However, scientists are still searching...

Sun-like star Kronos shows signs of having ingested 15 Earth masses worth of rocky planets, prompting Princeton astronomers to nickname it for the Titan who ate his young. This artist’s rendering of the diverse rocky planets in our galaxy hints at what Kronos’s planets might have looked like before the star enveloped them. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech)

Sun-like star Kronos shows signs of having ingested 15 Earth masses worth of rocky planets, prompting astronomers to name it after the Titan who ate his children. ‘Kronos’ is enhanced in metals and other rock-forming elements but not in volatiles, prompting a team to conclude that it absorbed as much as 15 Earth masses worth of rocky planets. Its twin, ‘Krios,’ does not show this unusual pattern of enhancement.

In mythology,...

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, behind the planet’s rings. The much smaller moon Epimetheus is visible in the foreground.

Extreme methane rainstorms appear to have a key role in shaping Titan’s icy surface. Titan, the largest of Saturn’s more than 60 moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms, according to research by a team of UCLA planetary scientists and geologists. Although the storms are relatively rare – they occur less than once per Titan year, which is 29 and a half Earth years – they occur much more frequently than the scientists expected.

“I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that,” said Jonathan Mitchell, UCLA associate professor of planetary science and a senior author of the research, which was published Oct...