Astro Blog

https://eos.org/articles/scientists-discover-stromboli-like-eruption-on-volcanic Source:    By JoAnna Wendel, Eos/AGU By JoAnna Wendel, Eos/AGU. For GSS Energy Flow chapter 2. Excerpt: Jupiter’s moon Io is known for its lava fountains and roiling lava lakes, but scientists had never seen such an intense eruption in their data until now. ...But wait, you ask, didn’t Galileo plunge into Jupiter’s atmosphere at the end of its mission, way back in 2003? Well, yes. But the orbiter, at that point, had collected so much data about the Jovian system and its Galilean moons (Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa) that scientists still haven’t waded through it all, even 14 years later. ...Io’s surface is constantly gushing lava—every million years or so, the entire moon’s surface completely regenerates. From towering lava fountains that can reach 400 kilometers high to violently bubbling lava lakes that burst through freshly cooled crust, these oozing lava fields can stretch many thousands of s

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/artificial-intelligence-nasa-data-used-to-discover-eighth-planet-circling-distant-star  [includes video] Source:   NASA RELEASE 17-098 Excerpt: Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers “learn.” In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets. “Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to

https://eos.org/articles/four-planetary-landscapes-that-scientists-cant-explain Source:   By JoAnna Wendel, AGU/Eos Excerpt: These are just a handful of the hundreds of mysterious features across our solar neighborhood that beg to be studied closer. [see photos & info about:] "Brainy Mars", "Willy Wonka and the Taffy Factory" [on Mars], "Carolina Bays" [Earth], "Bright Streaks" [on Saturn's moon Dione]...