Astro Blog

Source:   By Lee Billings , Scientific American Blog Excerpt: More than 30 worlds have new names drawn from world mythology, literature and history. ...The IAU’s NameExoWorlds contest, which began in July 2014, consisted of public and semi-private rounds of submissions and voting on names for 32 exoplanets and 15 host stars. ...The very first confirmed exoplanetary system, announced in 1992, consists of three rocky worlds orbiting a stellar remnant, a millisecond pulsar ignominiously named PSR 1257+12. Now, the pulsar is suitably called “Lich,” a name for an undead wizard from Greek, Dutch, and Norse folktales. Its three planets bear similarly spooky names drawn from ghostly mythological creatures—“Poltergeist,” “Phobetor” and “Draugr.” Pegasi 51, the first normal star found to host exoplanets, now has a more mellifluous name: “Helvetios,” a Latinized reference to the Helvetians, a tribe of Celts that lived in the Swiss Alps. The name nods to the Swiss astronomer...

Source:  NASA Feature Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0xkupKwjfM&feature=youtu.be Latest New Horizons Science Photos - http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/index.php Images: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/pics/Very-Best-View-of-Pluto.png http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Science-Photos/pics/Very-best-view-of-Pluto-%28mosaic%29.jpg nasa.gov page for New Horizons - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-returns-first-of-the-best-images-of-pluto

Source:   By Sid Perkins, Science Excerpt: Miniplanets zooming through our early solar system passed close to our moon and tugged it into the strange, tilted orbit it has today, according to a new study. The findings solve a longstanding mystery and may also explain why Earth’s crust is unexpectedly rich in gold and platinum: When some of these small planets slammed into Earth, they delivered a payload of precious metals. Scientists have long debated the origin of the moon. The prevailing idea, first proposed decades ago, is that a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, flinging material into space that then coalesced into our only natural satellite. According to current models of that collision, the ring of debris that eventually became the moon should have ended up in a plane tilted no more than 1° from the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth orbits the sun, says Kaveh Pahlevan, a planetary scientist at Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. But in fact, the moon’s orbital in...

Source:   By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7. Excerpt: Mars’ largest moon, Phobos, is slowly falling toward the planet, but rather than smash into the surface, it likely will be shredded and the pieces strewn about the planet in a ring like the rings encircling Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune  ...in 10-20 million years... that will persist for anywhere from one million to 100 million years, according to two young earth scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. In a paper appearing online this week in Nature Geoscience, UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal estimate the cohesiveness of Phobos and conclude that it is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that will pull it apart when it gets closer to Mars. Just as earth’s moon pulls on our planet in different directions, raising tides in the oceans, for example, so too Mars tugs differently on different parts of P...

Source:   By Ron Cowen, EoS, Earth & Space Science News, AGU Excerpt: ...The presence of ammonia-rich clay on much of the surface of Ceres suggests that this dwarf planet—the largest object in the asteroid belt—may have formed far out in the solar system, then wandered in.... https://eos.org/articles/the-dwarf-planet-that-came-in-from-the-cold-maybe

Source:   By Carolyn Gramling, Science. Also NASA, Cassini. 2015-10-30. Cassini samples an alien ocean. For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7. Excerpt: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has just sent back the first pictures from its deep plunge toward the surface of icy Enceladus, a flyby that took it through one of the moon’s geysers. ...Since Cassini began its flybys of Saturn and its moons in 2005, scientists have learned that beneath the layer of ice is a global ocean about 10 kilometers thick that may harbor life and probably contains hydrothermal vents. They have spotted more than 100 huge geysers of ice particles, water vapor, and organic molecules spewing from fractures in the ice covering Enceladus’s south polar region. These plumes shoot the contents of the moon’s subglacial ocean hundreds of kilometers high, in eruptions that may resemble curtains rather than columns. This week, the spacecraft made its deepest dive into one such plume—just 49 kilometers above the moon’s surfac...

Source:   NASA [Youtube video] NASA's Cassini Spacecraft is about to make a daring plunge through one of the plumes emerging from Saturn's moon Enceladus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nts-bkhoMt4&feature=youtu.be