Astro Blog

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7005 Source:   By Jet Propulsion Laboratory News 2017-11-20.  . For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 7. Excerpt: Fast Facts: › Seasonal dark streaks on Mars have been described as possible signs of flowing water; a new study shows they are a better fit to dry flow processes. › The steepness of more than 150 of these features was assessed with a telescopic camera on a NASA Mars orbiter. › The findings add to evidence that these environments may be too dry for microbes to thrive, despite the presence of water in hydrated salts. › How seasonal warming triggers these streaks is still a puzzle, and water may be involved.... 

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/15/16655236/new-planet-discovery-ross-128-b-red-dwarf Source:   By Loren Grush, The Verge Excerpt: ...Meet Ross 128 b, a newly discovered planet found orbiting around a small, faint star known as a red dwarf. The world, which is about one-and-a-half times the mass of Earth, may be in the star’s habitable zone, too. (That’s the spot where temperatures are just right, possibly allowing liquid water to pool on a planet’s surface.) Most exciting of all is that this planet is situated just 11 light-years away. That makes Ross 128 b the second closest potentially habitable exoplanet to Earth we know about after Proxima b, a rocky world that orbits around the nearest star to our Solar System, Proxima Centauri. However, Proxima Centauri isn’t a very “life-friendly” star. Also a red dwarf, ...it frequently burps out intense, high-energy solar flares. ...But Ross 128 b’s star doesn’t seem to flare much at all. ...Ross 128 b is very close to its sun, in an...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomers-spot-first-ever-space-rock-from-another-star/ Source:   By Lee Billings, Scientific American Excerpt: For the first time ever, an asteroid or comet from another star has been caught hurtling through our solar system, astronomers announced late Thursday. Provisionally designated A/2017 U1, the object appears to be less than a half-kilometer in diameter and is traveling at just over 40 kilometers per second—faster than humanity’s speediest outbound space probes. Because this is the first object of its type to be found, there are as yet no official rules for naming it, and its discoverers have balked at suggesting anything besides “Interstellar.” Whatever one might call it, though, it is presently racing away from the sun and has sparked a stampede of astronomers rushing to observe it before it fades entirely from view in the darkness of interstellar space. “All we can say right now is this was something that was tossed out of...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/science/ligo-neutron-stars-collision.html Source:   By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times 2017-10-16. . . For GSS A Changing Cosmos chapter 9. Excerpt: Astronomers announced on Monday that they had seen and heard a pair of dead stars collide, giving them their first glimpse of the violent process by which most of the gold and silver in the universe was created. The collision, known as a kilonova, rattled the galaxy in which it happened 130 million light-years from here in the southern constellation of Hydra, and sent fireworks across the universe. On Aug. 17, the event set off sensors in space and on Earth, .... Such explosions, astronomers have long suspected, produced many of the heavier elements in the universe, including precious metals like gold, silver and uranium. ...a pair of neutron stars, the shrunken dense cores of stars that have exploded and died, collided at nearly the speed of light. These stars are masses as great as the sun pa...

https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/oldest-lunar-calendars/ Source:   By NASA Solar System Exploration Research. Excerpt: The Oldest Lunar Calendars and Earliest Constellations have been identified in cave art found in France and Germany. The astronomer-priests of these late Upper Paleolithic Cultures understood mathematical sets, and the interplay between the moon annual cycle, ecliptic, solstice and seasonal changes on earth. The First (Lunar) Calendar ...The archaeological record’s earliest data that speaks to human awareness of the stars and ‘heavens’ dates to the Aurignacian Culture of Europe, c.32,000 B.C. Between 1964 and the early 1990s, Alexander Marshack published breakthrough research that documented the mathematical and astronomical knowledge in the Late Upper Paleolithic Cultures of Europe. Marshack deciphered sets of marks carved into animal bones, and occasionally on the walls of caves, as records of the lunar cycle. These marks are sets of crescents or lines. Artis...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cassinis-ldquo-grand-finale-rdquo-will-be-a-blaze-of-glory/ Source:   By Lee Billings, Scientific American For Investigation:  6.1, 8.2 Excerpt: The Cassini orbiter will burn out, but its legacy won’t fade away. ...For NASA’s Cassini orbiter—its fuel dwindling after 13 years exploring Saturn, along with the planet’s sprawling rings and dozens of icy moons—the end will come Friday at 7:55 A.M. Eastern time. That’s when mission planners project radio communications will be lost with the two-ton, bus-size spacecraft as it plunges into the giant planet’s turbulent atmosphere at more than 122,000 kilometers per hour. ...“We are concluding the longest, deepest, most comprehensive scientific exploration of a remote planetary system ever undertaken, a system so alien it might as well have been orbiting another star in another galaxy,” says Carolyn Porco, the planetary scientist who leads Cassini’s imaging team. “And we have been profoun...

https://eos.org/articles/big-space-rock-to-pass-near-earth-on-friday Source:   By Katherine Kornei, Eos/AGU For Investigation:   5.2, 6.1 Excerpt: An asteroid named for Florence Nightingale will make its closest approach to our planet since 1890 but will remain a safe distance away. In the roughly 2 decades that scientists have systematically tracked asteroids speeding past Earth, never before has one so large come so close. On Friday, an asteroid called Florence will zip by our planet just 7 million kilometers away, or about 18 times the Earth–Moon distance, according to NASA. Many other asteroids have come closer, but none was as big as Florence, which measures about 4 kilometers in diameter. ...Researchers will also be using NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar facility in California’s Mojave Desert to determine whether Florence has a natural satellite of its own, a moon. Fifteen percent of asteroids have moons, Mainzer noted, and finding a moon orbiting Florence would ...