Page 5 - Planets Moons News Today

 E-Mail IMAGE: An SwRI-led study identifies plumes of airborne dust emanating from sources inside gullies at Mars Russell crater megadune in the Martian spring. The plume phenomena support the hypothesis that CO2... view more  Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Systems (CTX) & NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (HiRISE)] SAN ANTONIO -- Feb. 24, 2021 -- A Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) scientist examined 11 Mars years of image data to understand the seasonal processes that create linear...

 E-Mail IMAGE: When flying past Venus in July 2020, Parker Solar Probes WISPR instrument, short for Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet... view more  Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher NASAs Parker Solar Probe captured stunning views of Venus during its close flyby of the planet in July 2020. Though Parker Solar Probes focus is the Sun, Venus plays a critical role i...

Credit: Hebrew University A team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) led by Dr. Assaf Horesh have discovered the first evidence of radio flares emitted only long after a star is destroyed by a black hole. Published in the periodical Nature Astronomy, the discovery relied upon ultra-powerful radio telescopes to study these catastrophic cosmic events in distant galaxies called Tidal Disruption Events (TDE). While researchers had known that these events cause the relea...

 E-Mail IMAGE: SwRI scientists studied the area imaged by Junos UVS instrument on April 10, 2020, and determined that a large meteoroid had exploded in a bright fireball in Jupiters upper atmosphere.... view more  Credit: SwRI SAN ANTONIO -- Feb. 22, 2021 -- From aboard the Juno spacecraft, a Southwest Research Institute-led instrument observing auroras serendipitously spotted a bright flash above Jupiters clouds last spring. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) team studied the data an...

German Aerospace Center scientists. The researchers launched these small lifeforms into Earths stratosphere, which replicates key characteristics of the Martian environment, and found that some microorganisms, in particular spores of black mold, survived the trip. This new way of testing endurance to space travel will be invaluable for understanding the threats and opportunities of microbes in future missions to Mars.

Credit: Nelson Parker The last complete reversal of the Earths magnetic field, the so-called Laschamps event, took place 42,000 years ago. Radiocarbon analyses of the remains of kauri trees from New Zealand now make it possible for the first time to precisely time and analyse this event and its associated effects, as well as to calibrate geological archives such as sediment and ice cores from this period. Simulations based on this show that the strong reduction of the magnetic field had conside...

 E-Mail In the search for planets capable of sustaining life, an international research team with members from ETH has taken a significant step forward. As the researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Communications, they found signs of a Neptune-sized planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, a mere 4.4 light years away from Earth. This exoplanet is located in a zone that may offer suitable conditions for life. The team was able to collect data with unprecedented sensitivity, thus...

Credit: NASA, Tallahassee Community College February 17, 2021, Mountain View, CA -- The SETI Institute announces its new NASA Community College Network (NCCN). This innovative program will bring NASA subject matter experts, research findings, and educational resources into the science classrooms of the nations community college system which, with nearly 1,200 2-year, associate degree-granting institutions represents 12 million students. "NASAs Science Activation program brings the unmatched ST...

 E-Mail IMAGE: CRIRES+ (CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph+) is an instrument installed on ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT) that is designed to search for potentially habitable super-Earth exoplanets. The instrument, which saw... view more  Credit: ESO The astronomy research instrument CRIRES+ is designed to study planets outside our solar system. It is now in operation at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The Institute of A...

 E-Mail IMAGE: The newly discovered TOI 451 planetary system features three planets orbiting the same sun. view more  Credit: Illustration courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center HANOVER, N.H. - February 12, 2021 - A newly discovered planetary system will provide researchers with the rare chance to study a group of growing planets, according to research co-led by Dartmouth. The new system, named TOI 451, is made up of at least three neighboring planets that orbit the same sun. Th...