Category Astronomy/Space

Venus’ electric wind. Credit: NASA/Conceptual Image Lab.

Venus has an ‘electric wind’ strong enough to remove the components of water from its upper atmosphere, which may have played a significant role in stripping the planet of its oceans. Glyn Collinson, Goddard Space Flight Center said: “We never dreamt an electric wind could be so powerful that it can suck oxygen right out of an atmosphere into space. This is something that definitely has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars.” The study found Venus’ electric field is so strong that it can accelerate the heavy electrically charged component of water – oxygen – to speeds fast enough to escape the planet’s gravity.

When water molecules rise into the upper atmosphere, sunlight breaks the water ...

BD+44°493 (α=02h 26m 49.74s, δ=+44° 57′ 46.52″ J2000.0) is the brightest known second-generation star in the sky and lies in eastern Andromeda. Image credit: Aladin Sky Atlas; Digitised Sky Survey — STScI/NASA, Coloured & Healpixed by CDS.

No one has yet observed the first stars that formed in the Milky Way. In all likelihood, they will never be directly observed, because the first stars are massive, ending their lives only a few millions years after their birth. But, astronomers can study those oldest stars by examining the elements these stars produce through nuclear fusion and the supernova explosions that mark the spectacular ends of their short lives.

Timothy Beers, the Notre Dame Chair in Astrophysics, is part of a team that has used the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on...

On July 4, NASA will fly a solar-powered spacecraft the size of a basketball court within 2,900 miles of the cloud tops of our solar system’s largest planet. As of June 16, Juno is 18 days and 8.6 million miles from Jupiter. On the evening of July 4, Juno will fire its main engine for 35 minutes, placing it into a polar orbit around the gas giant. During the flybys, Juno will probe beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and study its auroras to learn more about the planet’s origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

A series of 37 planned close approaches during the mission will eclipse the previous record for Jupiter set in 1974 by NASA’s Pioneer 11 spacecraft of 27,000 miles...

Asteroid 2016 HO3 has an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A small asteroid has been discovered in an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth, and it will remain so for centuries to come. As it orbits the sun, this new asteroid, designated 2016 HO3, appears to circle around Earth as well. It is too distant to be considered a true satellite of our planet, but it is the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or “quasi-satellite.”

“Since 2016 HO3 loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun, we refer to it as a quasi-satellite of Earth,” said Paul Chodas, JPL...