Page 6 - Planets Moons News Today

 E-Mail IMAGE: Remnants of planetary crust disintegrating under the tidal forces around a cool white dwarf. Material in the disc becomes vapourised close to the central star and flows onto the white... view more  Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick Observations of lithium and potassium around white dwarf stars point to remains of rocky planet crusts Analysis by astronomers led by University of Warwick shows chemical composition of crusts is very similar to Earths continental cr...

 E-Mail IMAGE: This illustration imagines what the distant object nicknamed "Farfarout " might look like in the outer reaches of our Solar System. The most distant object yet discovered in our Solar System,... view more  Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva With the help of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSFs NOIRLab, and other ground-based telescopes, astronomers have confirmed that a faint object discovered in 2018 and nicknamed "Farfarout" is indeed the most di...

 E-Mail IMAGE: This artists impression shows the planet orbiting the Sun-like star HD 85512 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail). This planet is one of 16 super-Earths discovered by the... view more  Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser Mini-Neptunes and super-Earths up to four times the size of our own are the most common exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system. Until now, super-Earths were thought to be the rocky cores of mini-Neptunes whose gassy atmospheres were blown awa...

 E-Mail IMAGE: Flensburg meteorite with black fusion crust: Parts of the fusion crust were lost during the flight through the atmosphere. The small fragment, weighing 24,5 grams, is about 4.5 billion years... view more  Credit: A. Bischoff / M. Patzek, University of Münster A meteorite that fell in northern Germany in 2019 contains carbonates which are among the oldest in the solar system; it also evidences the earliest presence of liquid water on a minor planet. The high-resolution ...

 E-Mail IMAGE: A river-fed sedimentary plain in Iceland bears resemblance to what might have fed Mars Gale Crater more than 3 billion years ago. Researchers at Rice University studied rover data on... view more  Credit: Photo by Michael Thorpe HOUSTON - (Jan. 20, 2021) - Once upon a time, seasons in Gale Crater probably felt something like those in Iceland. But nobody was there to bundle up more than 3 billion years ago. The ancient Martian crater is the focus of a study by Rice Univ...

Two scientists from CNRS and Sorbonne University working at the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Calculation (Paris Observatory - PSL/CNRS) have just shown that the influence of Saturns satellites can explain the tilt of the rotation axis of the gas giant. Their work, published on 18 January 2021 in the journal Nature Astronomy, also predicts that the tilt will increase even further over the next few billion years.

Far below the gaseous atmospheric shroud on Saturns largest moon, Titan, lies Kraken Mare, a sea of liquid methane. Cornell University astronomers have estimated that sea to be at least 1,000-feet deep near its center - enough room for a potential robotic submarine to explore.

 E-Mail IMAGE: This image of a glacier on Mars shows the abundance of boulders within the ice. High-resolution imaging of the surface of Mars suggests that debris-covered glacier deposits formed during multiple... view more  Credit: Joe Levy/Colgate University In a new paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of ScienceS ( PNAS), planetary geologist Joe Levy, assistant professor of geology at Colgate University, reveals a groundbreaking new analysis of the ...

 E-Mail IMAGE: Artistic rendition of the exoplanet WASP-107b and its star, WASP-107. Some of the stars light streams through the exoplanets extended gas layer. view more  Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser. The core mass of the giant exoplanet WASP-107b is much lower than what was thought necessary to build up the immense gas envelope surrounding giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, astronomers at Université de Montréal have found. This intriguing discovery by Ph.D. student C...

Loading video... VIDEO: This is CosmoView Episode 18 for press release noirlab2103: Giant Map of the Sky Sets Stage for Ambitious DESI Survey view more  Credit: Images and Videos: KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Legacy Imaging Survey, P. Marenfeld, D. Munizaga, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Music: Stellardrone - Airglow. Astronomers using images from Kitt Peak National Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory have created the largest ever map of the sky, comprising over a b...