Astro Blog

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/science/antarctica-snow-supernova.html Source:   By Katherine Kornei, The New York Times. Excerpt: Earth is continuously plowing through extraterrestrial dust. Tens of thousands of tons of the stuff, mostly from asteroids and comets, settles all over the planet every year. ...Recently, scientists analyzed dust collected from Antarctic snow and found an excess of radioactive iron. After ruling out contamination from nuclear weapons testing and other sources, the team concluded that the iron was produced by supernovas, fleeting explosions of stars more massive than the sun. This discovery suggests that stellar blasts might have rocked Earth and the rest of the solar system in the not-too-distant past. The results were published on Aug. 12 in Physical Review Letters [ https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.072701 ]. Meteorite hunters are drawn to Antarctica because the space rocks, which are dark, stand out against the snow...

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/artemis-1-map Source:   NASA.

https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/jupiters-annual-portrait-is-a-beaut/ Source:   By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. Excerpt: Just as families record the changing faces of their kids as they grow older, the Hubble Space Telescope each year captures the changing faces of the solar system’s four colorful gas-giant planets. The newest photo in that yearbook is a portrait of Jupiter taken June 27 that reveals clouds swirling in the planet’s turbulent atmosphere that are painted with a color palette more intense than seen in previous years. Mike Wong, an associate researcher in UC Berkeley’s Department of Astronomy and one of three members of the Hubble team taking the photos, was most intrigued by a mysterious color change around Jupiter’s equator: The formerly white equatorial belt has become orangish. And, surprisingly, Red Spot Jr., a planet that was red the last time it was photographed, has turned white. It is now back to the way it looked at its formation in 2000, before ...