Astro Blog

https://www.science.org/content/article/long-sought-hum-of-gravitational-waves-from-giant-black-holes-heard-for-first-time By Adam Mann, Science.  Excerpt: By turning networks of dead stars into galaxy-size gravitational wave detectors, radio astronomers have tuned into the slowly undulating swells in spacetime thought to arise from pairs of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that are about to collide. In a simultaneous announcement today, five separate international teams said that after nearly 20 years of effort they had found evidence for these gravitational waves. They are far longer than the waves  first captured  by ground-based detectors in 2015, which emanate from collisions of star-size objects. The findings not only open up a new window in gravitational wave astronomy, but will also help researchers answer questions about the origin and evolution of SMBHs, objects that sit at the center of galaxies and weigh as much as billions of Suns.... 

https://eos.org/articles/nearby-volcano-planet-likely-fueled-by-tidal-heating By Javier Barbuzano , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: An unusual planetary dance has produced an Earth-sized exoplanet brimming with volcanoes, likely furnished with an atmosphere, and maybe even containing water on its surface. Astronomers discovered this odd world orbiting a  red dwarf star  right in our galactic neighborhood—just 90 light-years away. The exoplanet, known as LP 791-18 d, orbits a red dwarf already known to host two other planets:  LP 791-18 b , a scorched, rocky world orbiting extremely close to the star, and  LP 791-18 c , a sub-Neptune 7 times more massive than Earth made of gas or icy material. The finding comes after a group of researchers led by astrophysicist  Björn Benneke  of the Université de Montréal in Canada used NASA’s recently retired  Spitzer Space Telescope  to take a closer look at the system....

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05987-9 ]  By Frank Postberg ,  Yasuhito Sekine ,  Fabian Klenner ,  Christopher R. Glein ,  Zenghui Zou ,  Bernd Abel ,  Kento Furuya ,  Jon K. Hillier ,  Nozair Khawaja ,  Sascha Kempf ,  Lenz Noelle ,  Takuya Saito ,  Juergen Schmidt ,  Takazo Shibuya ,  Ralf Srama  &  Shuya Tan , Nature.  Excerpt: Saturn’s moon Enceladus harbours a global ice-covered water ocean 2 , 3 . The Cassini spacecraft investigated the composition of the ocean by analysis of material ejected into space by the moon’s cryovolcanic plume 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 . The analysis of salt-rich ice grains by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer 10  enabled inference of major solutes in the ocean water (Na + , K + , Cl – , HCO 3 – , CO 3 2– ).... Here we present Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer mass spectra of ice grains emitted by Enceladus that show the presence of sodium phosphates. ...of the six elements—C, H, N, O, P and S—that are generally considered to be critical ingredien

https://eos.org/articles/saturns-shiny-rings-may-be-pretty-young By  Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...Data from NASA’s Cassini mission showed how fast dust has been pelting the Saturnian system, revealing that for the rings to have remained as shiny and dust-free as they are, they can be only as much as 400 million years old, much younger than the planet itself. ...The Sun and its planets formed around 4.5 billion years ago, and many of the planets’ moons, including ours, followed not long after. Astronomers initially thought that  Saturn’s rings  formed during that early dynamical period, when large collisions were common. ...The rings’ orbits and compositions support the idea they are old. ...Measurements of the rainfall rate and the total mass of the rings from NASA’s  Cassini spacecraft , which orbited Saturn for 13 years, suggested that the rings must be far younger than the planet; otherwise, they would have disappeared already. Cassini also revealed that the rings

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/06/07/parker-solar-probe-flies-into-the-fast-solar-wind-and-finds-its-source/ By  Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has flown close enough to the sun to detect the fine structure of the solar wind close to where it is generated at the sun’s surface, revealing details that are lost as the wind exits the corona as a uniform blast of charged particles. It’s like seeing jets of water emanating from a showerhead through the blast of water hitting you in the face. In a paper to be published this week in the journal  Nature , a team of scientists led by Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park, report that the Parker Solar Probe has detected streams of high-energy particles that match the supergranulation flows within coronal holes, which suggests that these are the regions where the so-called “fast” solar wind originates. ...T