itsfullofstars:

The huge storm churning through the atmosphere in Saturn’s northern hemisphere overtakes itself as it encircles the planet in this true-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

This picture, captured on Feb. 25, 2011, was taken about 12 weeks after the storm began, and the clouds by this time had formed a tail that wrapped around the planet. Some of the clouds moved south and got caught up in a current that flows to the east (to the right) relative to the storm head. This tail, which appears as slightly blue clouds south and west (left) of the storm head, can be seen encountering the storm head in this view.

This storm is the largest, most intense storm observed on Saturn by NASA’s Voyager or Cassini spacecraft.

Keep reading.

maqsed-ki-tafteesh:

Ibn al-Shatir’s model for the appearances of Mercury, showing the multiplication of epicycles in a Ptolemaic enterprise. 14th century CE.

(via lesprite-delescalier-deactivate)

Bon Voyage Juno!

unknownskywalker:

Life’s building blocks found on surprising meteorite

Scientists have discovered amino acids, the building blocks of life in a meteorite where none were expected. The finding adds evidence to the idea that some of life’s key ingredients could have formed in space, and then been delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite impacts.

This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided. The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,093 degrees Celsius), hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but they were found anyway. The meteorite eventually crashed into northern Sudan.

Read the full story at Space.com

unknownskywalker:

Voyager 1 sees solar wind decline

The 33-year odyssey of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached a distant point at the edge of our solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind.

Now hurtling toward interstellar space some 17.4 billion kilometers from the sun, Voyager 1 has crossed into an area where the velocity of the hot ionized gas, or plasma, emanating directly outward from the sun has slowed to zero. Scientists suspect the solar wind has been turned sideways by the pressure from the interstellar wind in the region between stars.

The event is a major milestone in Voyager 1’s passage through the heliosheath, the turbulent outer shell of the sun’s sphere of influence, and the spacecraft’s upcoming departure from our solar system.

Image: Artist concept of the two Voyager spacecraft as they approach interstellar space.

• Source: NASA • See also: Astrobio.net

I reblogged something about this a few days ago, but this story is just so damn cool that I’m just gonna go ahead and blog it again.

If I live with one regret everyday of my life, it is that I am the most stupid sumbitch when it comes to calculus, cuz honestly I would have loved to be an astronomer. These are aheady times we live in my friends. While you and I mere earthly humans quack and quibble over leaked documents and wars a plenty, some man-made machine has reached the farthest point any humanly creation has ever reached. THIS. IS. AWESOME.

Way cool. Queue celebrations for two years from now!

(Source: The New York Times, via guerrillamamamedicine)

itsfullofstars:

EU-Backed ‘Electric Sail’ Could Be the Fastest Man-Made Device Ever Built

The EU is funding a three-year project at the Finnish Meteorological Institute to build the fastest man-made device in the universe: an electric sail, or ESAIL, that researchers say could make Pluto in just five years’ time.

(…) The ESAIL is propelled by solar radiation and therefore requires no chemical or ion propellant. But rather than actually unfurling a huge membranous sail to catch photons from the sun to provide thrust, the ESAIL repels protons.

Read more.

unknownskywalker:

Late, big bombardments brought heavy metals to Earth

One of the fundamental problems in planetary science is trying to determine how planetary bodies in the inner solar system formed and evolved. A new computer model suggests that huge objects – similar to the size of large Kuiper Belt Objects like Pluto and Eris — likely pummeled the Earth, Moon and Mars during the late stages of planetary formation, bringing heavy metals to the planetary surfaces.

This model – created by various researchers from across the NASA Lunar Science Institute — surprisingly answers many different puzzles across the Solar System, such as how Earth could retain metal-loving, elements like gold and platinum found in its mantle, how the interior of the Moon could actually be wet, and the strange distribution in the sizes of asteroids.

Read the full article at Universe Today

unknownskywalker:

Venus has a Moon?

It has the rather unfortunate name of 2002 VE68, and it’s an earth orbit-crossing asteroid that has been designated a Potential Hazardous Asteroid by the Minor Planet Center.

2002 VE68 used to be a run of the mill, potential impact threat, Near Earth Object. But approximately 7,000 years ago it had a close encounter with Earth that kicked it into a new orbit. It now occupies a place in orbit around the Sun where at its closest it wanders inside the orbit of Mercury and at its furthest it reaches just outside the orbit of the Earth.

2002 VE68 is now in a 1:1 orbital resonance with Venus, which means they both take the same time to orbit the Sun once. So by definition, 2002 VE68 is considered a quasi-satellite of Venus.

Often these resonances result in an unstable interaction, in which the bodies exchange momentum and shift orbits until the resonance no longer exists. In this case, scientists believe 2002 VE68 will only remain a Venusian quasi-satellite for another 500 years or so.

2002 VE68 is an X type asteroid, with an approximate size of 200 meters in diameter —based on its absolute magnitude— and with a spin rate of 13.5 hours. The amplitude of the fluctuation on the light curve of 2002 VE68 could imply hat it is actually a contact binary: two clumps of asteroidal material orbiting a center of mass in contact with each other.

• Source: Universe Today

unknownskywalker:

Ice lake on Mars

This is a giant patch of frozen water inside an unnamed impact crater on Mars. The existence of this water-ice patch on Mars makes life a more likely possibility and raises the prospect that past or present life will one day be detected.

The crater with ice disc is on the Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of Mars’s far northern latitudes. The crater is 35 km wide, with a maximum depth of about 2 km. The image was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express.

Scientists believe the water-ice is present all year round because the temperature and pressure are not sufficient to allow it to change states and vaporise into the atmosphere. It is not frozen carbon dioxide, because this type of ice had already disappeared from the north polar cap by the time this image was taken.

• Source: European Space Agency (Flickr)

unknownskywalker:

The boiling, erupting Sun

This is not a space-based image from some bazillion dollar observatory! This phenomenal picture was taken by astrophotographer Alan Friedman with this relatively small ’scope. He shot it on October 20th, and it shows our nearest star in the light of hydrogen, specifically what astronomers call Hα (H-alpha).

• Source: Learn more about the image at Bad Astronomy

unknownskywalker:

Massive X-ray-Belching Black Hole Finally Fits Cosmic Theory

A massive black hole that is spewing X-rays and locked in a tight orbital dance around a huge, dim star finally has a good origins story.

The enormous stellar black hole M33 X-7 has 15.7 times the mass of the sun and is orbiting an even larger star – which is 70 times the sun’s mass – once every 3.45 days. As a further wrinkle, the companion star is much dimmer than usual for its mass. The pair is located about 2.7 million light-years from Earth in the galaxy Messier 33.

In the new model, the black hole-star pairing stems from a giant star – the future black hole – nearly 100 times the mass of our sun, circling a second star of about 30 solar masses every three days or so. In such a tight orbit, the future black hole is able to start transferring mass while it is still burning hydrogen into helium.

As a result, it loses most of its hydrogen envelope (becoming a so-called Wolf-Rayet star) and sheds the rest of the envelope in the form of stellar wind, exposing its helium core. Its companion grows far more massive in the process, becoming the larger and more massive of the two stars. But it remains dim because the added mass doesn’t dramatically change the rate of nuclear reactions in its core.

Finally the progenitor star collapses under its own gravity, yielding a black hole, and begins absorbing stellar wind from its companion, leading to powerful X-ray emission. Energy released during the gravitational collapse imparts a kick to the black hole that leads to an elliptical orbit, and the black hole’s spin results from the spin of the star itself.

According to the researchers, existing Wolf-Rayet binaries containing massive companion stars may represent the early stages of process that led to M33 X-7, providing further evidence for the model.

Image: The massive black hole in M33 X-7 is hidden in the X-ray bright center of the pancake-like accretion disk of matter. The hot and massive star companion (blue) is losing mass in a wind that gets pulled and captured by the black hole.

• Source: Space.com

scipsy:

60” Mount Wilson TElescope: Vision (by Eric Curry)

This is an image of the 60” telescope located atop Mount Wilson observatory here in southern CA. The scope and structure were built and completed around 1908. Most of the material and structures etc. were hauled up the 9.5 mile trail to the summit via mule carts. In those days, there was not a serviceable road wide enough to handle trucks of the day. The telescope and mounting base alone is 21.5 tons of moving parts, all brought up and erected by hand.

(via freshphotons)