Astro Blog

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/science/astronomy-webb-telescope.html By  Dennis Overbye , The New York Times.  Excerpt: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. ...For three days in December, some 200 astronomers filled an auditorium at the institute to hear and discuss the first results from the telescope. ...Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets. (Data suggest that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser

https://www.science.org/content/article/mars-had-long-lived-magnetic-field-extending-chances-life By Zack Savitsky, Science.  Excerpt: Once upon a time, scientists believe, Mars was far from today’s cold, inhospitable desert. Rivers carved canyons, lakes filled craters, and a magnetic field may have fended off space radiation, keeping it from eating away the atmospheric moisture. As the martian interior cooled, leading theories hold, its magnetic field died out, leaving the atmosphere undefended and ending this warm and wet period, when the planet might have hosted life. But researchers can’t agree on when that happened. Now, fragments from a famous martian meteorite, studied with a new kind of quantum microscope, have yielded evidence that the planet’s field persisted until 3.9 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years longer than many had thought. The clues in the meteorite, a Mars rock that ended up on Earth after an impact blasted it from its home planet, could extend Mars’s

https://eos.org/articles/nasas-perseverance-rover-records-the-first-sounds-of-a-dust-devil-on-mars By Jon Kelvey , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In a stroke of luck, the SuperCam microphone on Perseverance was turned on the moment a dust devil swept directly over the rover. ...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/long-lived-lakes-reveal-a-history-of-water-on-mars By  Sarah Derouin , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The northern hemisphere of Mars is divided into two broadly distinctive areas: the smooth northern lowlands and the pockmarked southern highlands. The region of  Arabia Terra  ...is thought to contain some of the planet’s oldest rocks, at more than 3.7 billion years old. Among the craters in the southern highlands, valleys and paleolakes abound, exposing sedimentary and geomorphologic evidence of liquid water. However, relatively few paleolakes have been identified in Arabia Terra.  Dickeson et al.  ...describe seven new paleolakes in the region. The researchers focused on paleolake features including lake levels, drainage catchments, fans, and lake outlets. ...There was evidence of surface water inflows that filled the lakes as well as outlet streams that drained them, forming a cascading chain of lakes. The team also observed multiple past water levels within

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-best-of-jwsts-cosmic-portraits/ By Clara Moskowitz , Scientific American.  Excerpt: [Images Jupiter, Neptune and their rings as well as the phantom galaxy, M74.]