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 ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/science/mars-tsunami-crater.html Source:   By Robin George Andrews, New York Times.   Excerpt: A new study, published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, suggests that a 75-mile-wide impact scar in the Martian northern lowlands is to the red planet what the Chicxulub crater is to Earth: the mark of a meteor that generated a mega-tsunami when the planet was relatively young. If accurate, the finding adds evidence to the hypothesis that Mars once had an ocean, and would have implications for our search for life there....

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/science/nasa-tess-exoplanets-astronomy.html See also Newly discovered exoplanet trio could unravel the mysteries of super-Earth formation in Science Magazine . [ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/newly-discovered-exoplanet-trio-could-unravel-mysteries-super-earth-formation ] Source:   By Dennis Overbye, New York Times. Excerpt: NASA’s new planet-hunting spacecraft, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is now halfway through its first tour of the nearby universe. It has been looking for worlds that might be fit for you, me or some other form of life, and as usual, nature has been generous in its rewards. Since its launch in April 2018, TESS has already discovered 21 new planets and 850 more potential worlds that have yet to be confirmed, all residing within a few dozen light years of the sun and our own solar system, according to George Ricker, an M.I.T. researcher who heads the TESS project. So far, he said, TESS “has far exceeded...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/science/nasa-mars-rover-life.html Source:   By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times. Excerpt: Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today. In a measurement taken on Wednesday, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on Thursday, and by Friday, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news, which has not yet been announced by NASA. ...Methane, if it is there in the thin Martian air, is significant, because sunlight and chemical reactions would break up the molecules within a few centuries. Thus any methane detected now must have been released recently. On Earth, microbes known as methanogens thrive in places lacking oxygen, such as rocks deep underground and the digestive tracts of animals, and they release methane as a...

• comparison image between Pioneer’s visit(s) and a more recent ground-based image - http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=21649 • HST images - http://hubblesite.org/image/3368/news/20-jupiter • animation of GRS shrunk another 20% or so - http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=08&month=06&year=2019 • Christopher Go - http://astro.christone.net/jupiter/ • Anthony Wesley (see 2019 Apr) - http://www.acquerra.com.au/astro/gallery/jupiter/ • Damian Peach (2019) - http://www.damianpeach.com/jupiter.htm