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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Shedding Light on Pluto’s Nitrogen Glaciers

    September 20, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    © NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. The polar cap of « Sputnik Planum », in false colors, is surrounded by mountains which have been eroded and shaped by the glacial activity. The dark areas are covered by organic materials produced by the photolysis of methane by solar ultraviolet light.

    © NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. The polar cap of « Sputnik Planum », in false colors, is surrounded by mountains which have been eroded and shaped by the glacial activity. The dark areas are covered by organic materials produced by the photolysis of methane by solar ultraviolet light.

    What is the origin of the large heart-shaped glacier revealed in 2015 on Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft? Two researchers show that Pluto’s peculiar insolation and atmosphere favor nitrogen condensation near the equator, in the lower altitude regions, leading to an accumulation of ice at the bottom of Sputnik Planum, a vast topographic basin...

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    Twin Jets Pinpoint the Heart of an Active Galaxy

    September 19, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Twin jets pinpoint the heart of an active galaxy

    3-mm GMVA image of the galaxy NGC 1052 showing a compact region at the centre and two jets (bottom), and sketch of the system with an accretion disk and two regions of entangled magnetic fields forming two powerful jets (top). The compact region in the image pinpoints the location of the supermassive black hole at the heart of NGC 1052, and the enormous magnetic fields surrounding the event horizon trigger the two powerful jets observed with our radio telescopes. Credit: Anne-Kathrin Baczko et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics

    A team has measured the magnetic field in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. A bright and compact feature of only 2 light days in size was directly observed by a world-wide ensemble of mm-wave radio telescopes in the heart of the active galaxy NGC 1052...

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    Hubble finds a Lenticular Galaxy standing out in the crowd

    September 19, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Hubble image of outskirts and core of PGC 83677

    Credits: NASA/ESA/Hubble; acknowledgements: Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)

    Captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), this scene shows PGC 83677, a lenticular galaxy—a galaxy type that sits between the more familiar elliptical and spiral varieties.

    It reveals both the relatively calm outskirts and intriguing core of PGC 83677. Here, studies have uncovered signs of a monstrous black hole that is spewing out high-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light.
    http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-finds-a-lenticular-galaxy-standing-out-in-the-crowd/

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    Solar System could have Evolved from Poorly Mixed Elemental Soup

    September 18, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Nicolas Dauphas, the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences, holds a chondrite meteorite that contains a puzzling mismatch in isotopic composition with Earth’s crust. The mismatch puzzles scientists because they long believed that Earth formed from planetary objects similar to meteorites. Dauphas and his colleagues present research this week in Nature that explains how this mismatch could have come about.

    Credit: Jean Lachat/University of Chicago Nicolas Dauphas, the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences, holds a chondrite meteorite that contains a puzzling mismatch in isotopic composition with Earth’s crust. The mismatch puzzles scientists because they long believed that Earth formed from planetary objects similar to meteorites. Dauphas and his colleagues present research this week in Nature that explains how this mismatch could have come about.

    Chondrite meteorites contain a puzzling mismatch in isotopic composition with Earth’s crust. The mismatch puzzles scientists because they long believed that Earth formed from planetary objects similar to meteorites. For the past 10 years, scientists have been trying to understand why...

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