Cast your vote for Photo of the Week!
15 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted Photo of the week
in15 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted Photo of the week
in15 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted Jupiter, stargazing, Venus
in
Source:LiveScience
This past Tuesday evening, I went outside for a break with a colleague. Gazing at the night sky, I saw a bright star just above the tree line to my right. I knew it wasn’t Jupiter because I had spotted the massive planet time and time again, and not to mention, I knew it was located to my left. (North/South: I don’t know. Left/Right: Now you got me!) I took out my handy SkyView app and found that the star was actually Venus! How excited was I? Venus and Jupiter in the same night!
Well, here’s a great infographic that will help you locate Jupiter and Venus tonight. You’ll be able to see their dance for a couple of months.
Want to see what else the sky has to offer tonight? Check out my “Stargazing:Tonight’s Sky” link at the top of my homepage. Everyday, you’ll get an idea of what to expect in the night sky. It’s fabulous.
13 Tuesday Dec 2011
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New photos of Dione were captured yesterday by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Dione [Die-OH-nee] looks like our moon, doesn’t it? But the grooves above look a bit like the ones on the massive Vesta.
Including Dione, Saturn has more than 60 moons. Read more about Dione here.
Cassini is expected to head over to another one of Saturn’s moons – Titan – today. We’ll keep you posted here on Space Oddities.
13 Tuesday Dec 2011
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When scientists examined a photograph of Vesta, the second largest object in the asteroid belt, they were surprised to find what the massive object was made of.
Vesta is composed of many different layers of rock and material. This means that Vesta’s classification is somewhere between that of an asteroid and a planet. It’s one of the most ‘unique’ asteroids a spacecraft has visited, according to NASA.
Shall we call it a plasteroid? Or a planetoid? Maybe Vesta is a dwarf planet?
“Vesta’s iron core makes it special and more like terrestrial planets than a garden-variety asteroid,” said Carol Raymond, Dawn’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a release. “The distinct compositional variation and layering that we see at Vesta appear to derive from internal melting of the body shortly after formation, which separated Vesta into crust, mantle and core.”
The discovery was due to NASA’s Dawn Mission, which is now orbiting Vesta at its closest distance yet.
Dawn has been orbiting Vesta since this past July. The spacecraft will leave the giant object in July 2012 for its next adventure: researching the dwarf planet Ceres.
Read more about asteroids here.
11 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted Mars, NASA, Photo of the week, water
inThere’s now more evidence that water did in fact flow on Mars. The NASA Exploration Rover Opportunity, which has been exploring the Martian surface for more than 7 years, found a “mineral vein” made up of gypsum.
According to NASA:
“This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock … This stuff is a fairly pure chemical deposit that formed in place right where we see it. That can’t be said for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found. It’s not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it’s the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs.”
Read more about the possibility of water on other planets, and even some moons, here.
07 Wednesday Dec 2011
Posted Solar activity, Uncategorized, Video
inTags
It’s the video everyone is talking about.
It shows a mysterious object appearing near Mercury after a massive solar storm smashes into the planet. According to the video, the object in question is a “cloaked” UFO.
I thought it could be material from Mercury’s surface erupting into space. I’ve read that CMEs are incredibly powerful (A large CME could power the United States for a million years). But a couple minutes into the video, I was at a loss. Unfortunately, I’m not a scientist.
What do you see?
06 Tuesday Dec 2011
Tags
Exoplanet App, habitable zone, Kepler 22-b, kepler 22b, planetary habitablity laboratory, Super Earth
With thousands of planetary candidates under its belt, NASA’s Kepler mission has finally found a planet that might be just right for life.
The planet, called Kepler 22-b, is a bit more than twice the size of Earth and 600 light years away. “Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets,” NASA stated in a release.
This would be Kepler’s first confirmed planet in the Goldilocks – or habitable – zone. This means that the planet is situated far enough away from the sun where it’s not too hot, or too cold. The planet orbits a sun that is similar to ours, too, according to NASA.
However, not everyone believes the “habitable” distinction is correct. The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) believes Kepler-22 b is an uninhabitable, Warm Neptunian.
“The recent confirmation of Kepler 22-b does not qualify as a potential habitable exoplanet on the catalog. It is in the habitable zone of the star, but it is too big and classified here as a Warm Neptunian.”
UPDATE: The PHL just provided another updated scenario for Kepler 22-b.
“We modeled now a best case scenario using a mass-radius relationship that assumed an ocean planet with corrected data and things changed a lot. Without mass is very difficult to assess the habitability of Kepler-22b. More observations will be needed to clarify its habitability status. It is so close to a transition point between superterrans and neptunians.”
Even my iPhone’s Exoplanet App (It’s excellent, by the way. A must get!) cautioned readers that, “One should keep in mind that there are large uncertainties in every climate model and our definition of habitability is not well established.”
And remember, if you take a look at the model above, you can see that Mars is also in the habitable zone. Food for thought.
We’re learning more and more about new planetary discoveries, and even as recently as October, we learned that the habitable zone around one specific class of star is larger than once expected.
So while the Kepler 22-b news definitely exciting, I’m sure we’ll hear more about it in the future and we might have a completely different story to share. For example, this past September, the European Southern Observatory announced that it had found 16 “Super-Earths.” However, depending on what website or app you use, that “Super-Earth” figure is different. So what’s the real number? What, if any, planet was re-classified? You don’t really hear much about that.
If you have a reliable source for an exoplanet count, please share it here.
Read about some other Kepler discoveries here.
Later this week, we’ll talk more about the Kepler mission, how it finds planets, and how you can search for planets from your very own computer.
03 Saturday Dec 2011
From NASA:
“The moon Enceladus, one of the jewels of the Saturn system, sparkles peculiarly bright in new images obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The images of the moon, the first ever taken of Enceladus with Cassini’s synthetic aperture radar, reveal new details of some of the grooves in the moon’s south polar region and unexpected textures in the ice. These images, obtained on Nov. 6, 2011, are the highest-resolution images of this region obtained so far.”
Read more here.
Want to see more ice worlds? Check out our gallery.
02 Friday Dec 2011
Posted asteroid
inTags
This video was created using images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is orbiting a 330-mile asteroid called Vesta. The images were compiled this past summer.
Read more about Vesta, Dawn’s mission, and asteroids in this previous post.