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    Category Astronomy/Space

    History of Titan’s Landscape resembles that of Mars, not Earth

    May 20, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Left to right: River networks on Mars, Earth, and Titan. Researchers report that Titan, like Mars but unlike Earth, has not undergone any active plate tectonics in its recent past. Credit: Benjamin Black/NASA/Visible Earth/JPL/Cassini RADAR team. Adapted from images from NASA Viking, NASA/Visible Earth, and NASA/JPL/Cassini RADAR team

    Left to right: River networks on Mars, Earth, and Titan. Researchers report that Titan, like Mars but unlike Earth, has not undergone any active plate tectonics in its recent past. Credit: Benjamin Black/NASA/Visible Earth/JPL/Cassini RADAR team. Adapted from images from NASA Viking, NASA/Visible Earth, and NASA/JPL/Cassini RADAR team

    Rivers on 3 worlds tell different tales. The environment on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, may seem surprisingly familiar: Clouds condense and rain down on the surface, feeding rivers that flow into oceans and lakes. Outside of Earth, Titan is the only other planetary body in the solar system with actively flowing rivers, though they’re fed by liquid methane instead of water. Long ago, Mars also hosted rivers, which scoured valleys across its now-arid surface...

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    Mapping Super Massive Black Holes in the Distant Universe

    May 20, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A slice through largest-ever three-dimensional map of the Universe. Earth is at the left, and distances to galaxies and quasars are labelled by the lookback time to the objects (lookback time means how long the light from an object has been travelling to reach us here on Earth). The locations of quasars (galaxies with supermassive black holes) are shown by the red dots, and nearer galaxies mapped by SDSS are also shown (yellow). The right hand edge of the map is the limit of the observable Universe, from which we see the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the light “left over” from the Big Bang. Fluctuations in the CMB as observed by the recent ESA Planck satellite mission are shown. The bulk of the empty space in between the quasars and the edge of the observable universe are from the “dark ages”, prior to the formation of most stars, galaxies, or quasars. Credit Anand Raichoor and the SDSS Collaboration.

    A slice through largest-ever three-dimensional map of the Universe. Earth is at the left, and distances to galaxies and quasars are labelled by the lookback time to the objects (lookback time means how long the light from an object has been travelling to reach us here on Earth). The locations of quasars (galaxies with supermassive black holes) are shown by the red dots, and nearer galaxies mapped by SDSS are also shown (yellow). The right hand edge of the map is the limit of the observable Universe, from which we see the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the light “left over” from the Big Bang. Fluctuations in the CMB as observed by the recent ESA Planck satellite mission are shown...

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    Icy Ring surrounds young Planetary System

    May 19, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Composite image of the Fomalhaut star system. The ALMA data, shown in orange, reveal the distant and eccentric debris disk in never-before-seen detail. The central dot is the unresolved emission from the star, which is about twice the mass of our sun. Optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is in blue; the dark region is a coronagraphic mask, which filtered out the otherwise overwhelming light of the central star. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. MacGregor; NASA/ESA Hubble, P. Kalas; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

    Composite image of Fomalhaut star system. The ALMA data, shown in orange, reveal the distant and eccentric debris disk in never-before-seen detail. The central dot is the unresolved emission from the star, which is about twice the mass of our sun. Optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is in blue; the dark region is a coronagraphic mask, which filtered out the otherwise overwhelming light of the central star. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. MacGregor; NASA/ESA Hubble, P. Kalas; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

    Observations suggest chemical kinship to comets in our own solar system. An international team using ALMA has made the first complete millimeter-wavelength image of the ring of dusty debris surrounding the young star Fomalhaut...

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    Moon Orbits 3rd Largest Dwarf Planet in our Solar System

    May 19, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Hubble spots a moon around the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. These two images, taken a year apart, reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. Each image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, shows the companion in a different orbital position around its parent body. 2007 OR10 is the third-largest known dwarf planet, behind Pluto and Eris, and the largest unnamed world in the solar system. The pair is located in the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy debris left over from the solar system's formation. Credits: NASA, ESA, C. Kiss (Konkoly Observatory), and J. Stansberry (STScI)

    Hubble spots a moon around the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. These two images, taken a year apart, reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10. Each image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3, shows the companion in a different orbital position around its parent body. 2007 OR10 is the third-largest known dwarf planet, behind Pluto and Eris, and the largest unnamed world in the solar system. The pair is located in the Kuiper Belt, a realm of icy debris left over from the solar system’s formation. Credits: NASA, ESA, C. Kiss (Konkoly Observatory), and J. Stansberry (STScI)

    The combined power of 3 space observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, has helped astronomers uncover a moon orbiting the third largest dwarf planet, catalogued as 2007 OR10...

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