Category Astronomy/Space

This map-projected view of Ceres was created from images taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft during its high-altitude mapping orbit, in August and September, 2015. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Mysteries and insights about Ceres are being discussed this week at the European Planetary Science Conference in Nantes, France. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is providing scientists with tantalizing views and other data about the intriguing dwarf planet that they continue to analyze. “Ceres continues to amaze, yet puzzle us, as we examine our multitude of images, spectra and now energetic particle bursts,” said Chris Russell, Dawn principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles.

A new color-coded topographic map shows more than a dozen recently approved names for features on Ce...

This is the temperature of the surface around the southern pole of the moon according to LRO data. Credit: NASA

Water reserves found on the moon are the result of asteroids acting as ‘delivery vehicles’ and not of falling comets as was previously thought. Using computer simulation, scientists have discovered that a large asteroid can deliver more water to the lunar surface than the cumulative fall of comets over a billion year period.

At the beginning of the space age, during the days of the Apollo program, scientists believed the moon to be completely dry. At these earliest stages in satellite evolution, the absence of an atmosphere and the influence of solar radiation were thought enough to evaporate all volatile substances into space...

These are enormous discharges of subterranean water that dug out the biggest flood channels in the solar system over 3 billion years ago. For many years it was thought that these megafloods were caused by the release of a deep global hydrosphere in the Martian subsoil. However new resesarch has revealed that their origin could have been vast quantities of sediment and ice deposited 450 million years before the floods.

Sediments appear to have been carried by rivers and glaciers filled up enormous canyons below an ancient ocean located in the Northern Lowlands, and released water trapped in these buried sediments that caused the megafloods, whose effects we can observe in the present.

The canyons filled up, the ocean disappeared and the planet surface remained frozen for around 450 millio...

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare – as seen in the bright flash in the lower right hand side of the sun – on Sept. 28, 2015. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extraordinarily hot material in flares and which is typically colorized in red. Credits: NASA/SDO

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 10:58 a.m. EDT on Sept. 28, 2015. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation...