#solar-system

#solar-system

Plumes of water ice and vapor spray from the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus, as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.(NASA/AP)Saturn's moon Enceladus has enticed scientists for years with its plumes fizzing their way up from an ocean beneath a thick crust of ice.Now there's a new element to the story, literally: That cold, dark oceanappears to contain a form of phosphorus, an essential ingredient forlife as we know it.

Rachel Maddow has something special for anyone who appreciates the occasional digressions into history on her weekly MSNBC show.She and her longtime producer, Isaac-Davy Aronson, debuted the first episode of Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News on Monday.The six-episode podcast looks at historical incidents that can teach us lessons about current events.

We live in a bubbleliterally.It's called the heliosphere, and it's made of tenuous plasma billowing from the sun.This ionized gas flows outward along magnetic field lines emerging from our star, spooling out in radial spirals tied to the sun's rotation.To venture beyond where this wind wanes against the greater flows of plasma coursing through our galaxy is, in a very real sense, to leave our solar system behind.

The Fermi paradox takes its name from a 1950s visit by physicist Enrico Fermi to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.One day, as Fermi was walking to lunch with physicist colleagues Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York, one mentioned a New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens stealing public trash cans from the streets of New York.

1. A team of scientists have captured the first ever X-ray image of a single atom. 2. This breakthrough was made possible by a novel method using an electron microscope, allowing the scientists to focus the X-ray beam to a spot size of just 0.2 nanometres. 3

When you hear the word meteor, you probably think of so-called shooting starsthe streaks of light that zip across the night sky when a small bit of space debris, usually no bigger than a grain of sand, speeds through Earth's atmosphere and burns up because of friction with air molecules.If you have a more catastrophic bent, you might think of the bigger chunks of stuff that blow apart during their passage, generating powerful shock waves: A good example is the one that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, in early 2013, injuring about 1,500 people and damaging thousands of buildings.

Ryan Chetiyawardana-known as Mr Lyan-is world famous for his cutting-edge cocktails.At his DC bar, Silver Lyan in Penn Quarter's Riggs hotel, the London-based barman has served microwaved Manhattans and sophisticated Jell-O shots.But his latest cocktail menu is perhaps the weirdest and most esoteric in DC.

If you've ventured outside after sunset recently and happened to glance to the west, you may have noticed an astonishingly bright star glaring down on you, seemingly hovering in the sky.Is it a helicopter, a supernova, agaspUFO?Nope.That's Venus, the second rock from the sun, Earth's evil twin and frequent UFO impersonator.

Five planets will align in the night sky for an extraordinary view on Tuesday in a phenomenon dubbed a planetary parade.The planets Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus and Mars will come together on the western horizon, near the crescent moon, for a brief display after sunset.People almost anywhere on Earth with a westerly view and clear skies will be able to catch it.

In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could.

Move Over, Oumuamua
Remember Oumuamua, that weird and allegedly alien object that flew past Earth back in 2017, when we were all so young and starry-eyed?Now, some scientists have a new and boring explanation for what it was - and reader, it may have nothing to do with aliens.In a new study published in the journal Nature this week, astronomy researchers out of Cornell and Berkeley suggested that Oumuamua, the interstellar interloper that whizzed past Earth in 2017 and has puzzled, mesmerized, and frustrated astronomers ever since, may well have been a gas-propelled comet with a tail so faint that we couldn't see it.

No matter what science fiction says, it's hard to imagine humans will ever be able to stomp around a planet in another planetary system looking for life - the distances, time, and energy involved are simply too great.But what if we could look somewhere else? Somewhere a little closer to home?What if fossilized alien microbes are already coming to visit us-even if it's by accident?

Scientists recently discovered an asteroid that tags along with Earth during its yearly journey around the sun.Dubbed 2023 FW13, the space rock is considered a "quasi-moon" or "quasi-satellite," meaning it orbits the sun in a similar time frame as Earth does, but is only slightly influenced by our planet's gravitational pull.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted Saturn's moon Enceladus spraying out a huge plume of water vapour, much bigger than any previously seen there.This enormous cloud might contain the chemical ingredients of life, escaping from beneath the moon's icy surface.In 2005, a NASA spacecraft called Cassini discovered icy particles squirting from Enceladus's subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon's surface.

How, exactly, living things emerged on Earth remains a mystery.Now a new experiment has revealed that blasts of solar particles could have kickstarted the process by creating some of the basic components of life.Time in the sun
Before so much as the first microbe existed, there had to be amino acids thought to have formed in one of the primordial oozes of early Earth.

Comet 238P/Read is a strange rock.Its location just past Mars in the main asteroid belt is an unusual spot for a comet in our Solar System.And it's missing frozen carbon dioxide, frequently found on comets.Comet Read's most compelling quirk, however, is that it definitely has water.In a new study published Monday in the journal Nature, astronomers directed the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) to study Comet 238P/Read using its Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec).

Saturn has regained its crown as the planet with the most moons in the solar system, just months after being overtaken by its fellow gas giant Jupiter.The leap-frog comes after the discovery of 62 new moons of Saturn, bringing its official total to 145.Jupiter, which added 12 moons to its tally in February, has 95 moons that have been formally designated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

In the red corner, Jupiter, the largest planet orbiting our sun, which shaped our solar system with its gravitational bulk.In the blue corner, Saturn, the magnificent ringed world with bewildering hexagonal storms at its poles.These two giant worlds are late in their bout for satellite-based supremacy.

Astronomers have discovered a rocky Earth-sized exoplanet they believe is "likely carpeted with volcanoes" and may be capable of supporting an atmosphere and liquid water, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.The strange new world, romantically dubbed LP 791-18d, has radius and a mass similar to Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope is stirring up more space mysteries with the discovery of an additional pair of debris belts around a young nearby star long believed to have only one.As opposed to having just one dusty ring roughly twice the size of the solar system's Kuiper Belt around it, JWST used the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, to spot two more dust belts nestled within the outer belt surrounding the star Fomalhaut.

About a year and a half ago, the United Arab Emirates announced an ambitious deep space mission to explore the asteroid belt, with the aim of visiting seven different asteroids.The Arab country, working with the University of Colorado Boulder, aimed to launch the mission as soon as 2028.It envisioned the probe as a suitable follow-up to the successful launch and flight of the Emirates Mars Mission, which reached orbit around Mars in early 2021 and is continuing to study the red planet's thin atmosphere and seasonal weather variations.

In our Solar System, the planetary orbits all have a similar orientation.Their orbital planes vary by a few degrees, but roughly the planets all orbit in the same direction.This invariable plane, as it's known, also has an orientation within a few degrees of the Sun's rotational plane.Most planetary systems have a similar arrangement, where planetary orbits and stellar rotation are roughly aligned.

Ultraviolet light blasting the atmosphere of giant exoplanet WASP-39b is producing a toxic gas called sulfur dioxide.WASP-39b, an exoplanet about 700 light years away, is about as massive as Saturn, but it orbits its Sun-like star on a scorchingly close four-day orbit.Its hellishly hot 1600°F atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, water, and a noxious chemical called sulfur dioxide.

Recent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that the innermost world of the TRAPPIST-1 system has no atmosphere - or at most, it's extremely thinly veiled with the tattered remnants of its original atmosphere.That's not surprising, given how closely the planet orbits a star with a wild past.

In late 2017, our Solar System received its very first known interstellar visitor: a bizarre cigar-shaped object hurtling past at 44 kilometers per second, dubbed 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first").Was it a comet?An asteroid?A piece of alien technology?Scientists have been puzzling over the origin and unusual characteristics of 'Oumuamua ever since, most notably its strange orbit, and suggesting various models to account for them.

ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.Whether or not we're alone in the universe is one of humanity and science's most enduring questions.But now a new paper is asking whether or not we're even alone on Earth.The theory was published this month in the International Journal of Astrobiology and proposes the possibility that sub-micron sized alien fossils or minerals may be floating through space or even buried deep under our planet's oceans or ice sheets as the result of asteroid impacts on other planets.

Moonal Beads
China's Chang'e-5 lander successfully drilled into the surface of the Moon back in 2020, culminating in the first successful sample return mission since the 1970s.Now that scientists are poring over the data, examining the 3.7 pounds of lunar regolith that were returned by the mission in 2021, they say they've made an exciting discovery.

10 minutes ago10 minutes ago The Moon has an estimated 270 trillion kilograms of water stored inside tiny glass beads that "explorers of tomorrow" can extract and use, a new study says.Researchers have discovered water inside glass beads formed by violent collisions of space rocks with the surface of the Moon, suggesting their potential use by "future explorers."

Analysis of lunar soil samples shows spheres of glass hold water inside them, scientists have said.Scientists say they have discovered water trapped inside tiny beads of glass scattered across the moon, suggesting a potential reservoir of this precious resource for future human activities on the lunar surface.