Category: Planets

The Soho ground-based telescope has recorded one of the largest episodes of volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon Io. It began in July last year and lasted about six months, accompanied by the release of a substance on Wednesday near the satellite.

These observations are important not only for scientists, but also for the automatic station “Juno”, which explores Jupiter and its moons and in 2023 will make two close flights past Io, observing its volcanoes, as well as determining the parameters of the plasma environment near the satellite.

In this mission, Edward White became the first American astronaut to make a spacewalk.

White and McDivitt spent a lot of time observing the Earth and photographing it.

Some photos of winter Mars from the MRO mission. The frost that can be seen on sand dunes and craters mainly consists of dry ice.

As for the characteristic dark spots, these are traces of spring “eruptions”. With an increase in temperature, dry ice sublimates, and jets of carbon dioxide escaping from under the surface raise geyser-like fountains of dark dust. Then it settles down, creating various bizarre drawings.

Someone might ask a logical question, is it snowing on Mars? Scientists say yes. But this happens only at the poles of the planet during the coldest nights.

The explosion gave rise to a powerful cosmic “firework”, the energy of which would be enough for the Sun to shine for 10 million years. At the same time, the gas of the former nebula moves at a speed of 150 kilometers per second away from the epicenter of the explosion, which is approximately equal to the speed at which the Sun rotates around the center of the Galaxy.

The stars survived this collision and are now flying away at a speed of about 13 and 29 kilometers per second.

Here is a color image of the craters Munch (bottom) and Sander (top), located in the area of the Plain of Heat on the surface of Mercury.

The bottom of the 50-kilometer Sander crater is covered with light material, and the 58-kilometer Munch crater has a dark “rim”.

It may seem that the white material is water ice, the existence of which has been proven in the polar craters of Mercury. However, in this case, this is excluded, since the Sander crater is not in eternal shadow, and in the daytime it heats up to +427 degrees Celsius.

NASA explained this feature as follows: “In most areas of Mercury, daytime temperatures are so high that some stones and minerals—which remain unchanged elsewhere in the Solar System—begin to evaporate on the planet closest to the Sun.”

Scientists together with astronomers of the Keck Observatory are investigating the formation and behavior of clouds of Saturn’s largest satellite.

The image on the left uses a filter that allows you to look beyond the lower layers of the atmosphere. Bright spots are clouds in the northern hemisphere.

On the right is a color composite image. Kraken Mare is a sea of methane, Belet is dark sand dunes, Adiri is an area with high reflectivity.

The two clouds seen by Webb confirm the theory that clouds form in the northern hemisphere at the end of summer when the Sun warms its surface. Subsequent observations by the Keck Observatory also revealed clouds confirming seasonal weather conditions.

Titan is a unique object of the Solar System. This is the only body other than the Earth on which there are rivers, lakes and seas. They do not consist of water, but of hydrocarbons such as ethane and methane. It is also the only satellite with a dense atmosphere.

The infrared image of Saturn and Titan, which was obtained on May 7, 2009 by the Gemini North Observatory team using the Altair adaptive optics system with a near—infrared imaging device (NIRI), is a complete aesthetic delight.
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Along the perimeter of the massive ring, the outer ring F is faintly visible, which was first detected in images taken by NASA’s Pioneer 11 spacecraft in 1979, and usually remains invisible in images obtained with ground-based telescopes. Several tiny Saturn moons are also visible, which in the image look like brighter dots on the ring system.

Astronomers have discovered a new warm Jupiter HD 167768b around an old evolved giant star. It is expected that in the next 150 million years, the expanding luminary will absorb the exoplanet.

HD 167768 is 5.3 billion years old. The star belongs to the spectral class G8 III and has a mass of 1.08 solar masses, and is ten times the size of our star. Its effective temperature is 4851 kelvin.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that the star continues its evolution, therefore it will move further along the branch of the red giants and expand. In the near future, this will lead to the death of an exoplanet.

The algorithm was applied to data obtained using the Zwicky Transient Facility, a sky survey instrument based at the Palomar Observatory of the California Institute of Technology.

“We needed help, and we knew that as soon as we taught our computers to do this work, they would take a lot of load off us,” the scientists say – “SNI has classified its first supernova in April 2021, and a year and a half later we reached a good milestone of 1000 supernovae.”

ZTF scans the night sky every night in search of changes, which are called transitional events. This concept includes everything from moving asteroids to exploding stars known as supernovae. ZTF sends out hundreds of thousands of alerts per night to astronomers around the world, notifying them of these events. Astronomers then use other telescopes to track and investigate the nature of the changing objects.

The star lost its outer shell less than a few thousand years ago.

Astronomers have determined that the Gamma Dove star in the Milky Way is not an ordinary star, but a unique object — the bare core of a massive star that lost its outer shell several thousand years ago due to interactions with a low-mass companion star. This is the first discovery of its kind.

Gamma Pigeon is a very rare object, since the phase of restructuring of the naked core into a hot white dwarf takes no more than 10 thousand years, which is only one thousandth of the total lifetime of a massive star. The ejection of the outer shell of the star could have occurred less than a few thousand years ago. It is expected that the Gamma of the Pigeon will become a target for future detailed studies, both spectroscopic and astroseismological.