Astro Blog

By Robin George Andrews , Science.  Excerpt: ...Jupiter’s moon Europa ...NASA hopes will greet its Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will begin its journey to the Jupiter system next month. ...Something extraordinary is concealed beneath the ice: a liquid saltwater ocean, potentially as clement and welcoming to life as Earth’s. ...Equipped with a battery of nine science instruments, Clipper will swoop past Europa in a series of nearly 50 ice-skimming flybys, remotely probing the ocean in hopes of finding a chemistry that could support life. ...“We’re not a life search mission. We’re a habitability mission,” says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission. But even Pappalardo, a cautious scientist who is constitutionally averse to hyperbole, says finding a hint of life is “not out of the question.”...  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-spacecraft-probe-possibility-life-europa-s-salty-ocean .

https://www.mercury-messenger.org/history-culture/galileo-telescope By Shanil Virani, Astronomical Society of the Pacific - Mercury online Excerpt: Between January 7 and January 13, 1610, a series of observations was made that would forever change how we would view the cosmos. The observer detailed in this log book a discovery made using a relatively new invention at that time. The observer had discovered four small, point sources of light very close to the (giant) planet Jupiter. On January 10, one of them disappeared for a short period. The observer attributed the disappearance of the object as being hidden behind Jupiter. Given his extensive observations, he was now forced to conclude that these four points of light were orbiting Jupiter and not Earth. The observer, Galileo Galilei, and his two small pieces of glass would usher in a scientific revolution that reverberates to this day. Until this discovery, and for some 1,500 years prior to Galileo, our ancestors accepted the model

By Rebecca Schneid , Time.  Excerpt: Starting next week, the moon, Earth’s closest celestial body, will be joined by a new neighbor: a second moon. From Sept. 29 until Nov. 25, astronomers calculate that 2024 PT5— which is what scientists think is an asteroid but have dubbed a “mini-moon”—will be looping around Earth. It will eventually break free of the planet’s gravitational orbit. Sadly, at just about 10 meters, the mini-moon will be extremely hard to see from Earth, but its presence will be there nonetheless for almost two months. The asteroid, which was discovered on Aug. 7 by  NASA , originated from the Arjuna asteroid belt, where it will likely return once it leaves Earth’s orbit. “Earth can regularly capture asteroids from the Near-Earth object (NEO) population and pull them into orbit, making them mini-moons,” researchers Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos wrote in their  published research ....  Full article at https://time.com/7022535/earth-second-moon-t

By Yuri Amelin  and  Qing-Zhu Yin , Science.  Excerpt: Analyses of rocks and soils delivered by the Apollo and Luna missions have established that the Moon is ancient, dry, and depleted of volatile elements. Studies also have indicated that early in its history, the Moon was covered with molten rock. This magma ocean eventually cooled and produced a compositionally diverse surface crust ( 1 ). How long the Moon produced magma has been an open question. On page 1077 of this issue, Wang  et al . ( 2 ) report that volcanism on the Moon occurred as recently as 120 million years ago (Ma). This implies that the Moon may still be able to produce magma. ...Determining the time range of lunar volcanism can be expanded by studying volcanic glass beads produced by lava fountains (eruptions) and preserved in lunar regolith (surface rock and debris) ( 11 ). These beads, despite sizes of only a few tens of micrometers, can be dated with argon ( 40 Ar/ 39 Ar) and uranium-lead (U-Pb) radioactive isoto

By Dennis Normile , Science.  Excerpt: The BepiColombo mission is now scheduled to arrive at the tiny and little-studied planet in November 2026, 11 months behind schedule. The European Space Agency (ESA), which developed the $1.8 billion BepiColombo in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), said in a 2 September statement that the  mission's scientific objectives will not be affected  by the delay. Meanwhile, the revised trajectory has the craft passing 165 kilometers from Mercury's surface on 4 September during a gravity assist flyby. The encounter, 35 kilometers closer than originally planned, provides an opportunity to test instruments and study the interaction between the solar wind and the planet's magnetic field. Scientists are planning to make the most of the flyby, starting up 10 of the mission's 16 instruments. ...Launched in October 2018,  BepiColombo is carrying two probes , ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, with 11 instruments,

By Leah Crane , NewScientist.  Excerpt: Astronomers have found six new worlds that look like planets, but formed like stars. These so-called rogue worlds are between five and 15 times the mass of Jupiter, and one of them may even host the beginnings of a miniature solar system. ...From their observations, the researchers determined that planetary mass  brown dwarfs  make up about 10 per cent of the objects in NGC 1333. That is far more than expected based on models of star formation, so there may be extra processes, such as turbulence, that drive the formation of these rogue worlds. ...One of the brown dwarfs is particularly unusual – it has a ring of dust around it just like the one that formed the planets in our solar system. At about five Jupiter masses, it is  the smallest world  ever spotted with such a ring, and it may mark the beginnings of a strange, scaled-down planetary system around a failed star... .  Full article at https://www.newscientist.com/article/2445279-jwst-found-r