It started as a big old ball of dust, so how did it end up like a giant pancake? Our resident physicist tells the true story using fake forces.
Why Is Our Solar System Flat?
Posted in space
Category: space – Page 152
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is crashing through a hailstorm of dust as it hurtles towards the sun at awe-inspiring speed.
The probe’s team members found that high-speed impacts with dust particles are not only more common than expected, they’re making tiny plumes of superhot plasma on the surface of the craft, according to an announcement for a new study.
The probe’s main mission goals are to measure the electric and magnetic fields near the sun and learn more about the solar wind—the stream of particles coming off of the sun, says David Malaspina, a space plasma physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Department and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Malaspina led the study, which the team will present at a conference this week.
Scientists want to send a swarm of small umbrellas into space to block the Sun’s warming ways from reaching the Earth’s surface.
Scientists report the first “strong direct evidence” for a fundamental cosmic phenomenon in a region of space near the beginning of the universe.
Science: for who ever want to landing or touch the sun 🌞 ☀️. Yeah what was believed impossible can become true.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is set to pass the Sun this year in a milestone moment for space exploration.
The probe, launched on Aug 12, 2018, is due to fly past the sun at 195 km/s, or 435,000 mph on 24 December 2024, the BBC reported.
NASA describes it as a mission to “” touch the Sun” on its website, aiming to get our “first-ever sampling of a star’s atmosphere.”
A mission more than a decade in the making, NASA’s Europa Clipper is slated to greatly expand our understanding of Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, including whether it could support life. These findings will be conducted by a suite of powerful instruments contributed by a myriad of academic and research institutions across the United States. Recently, NASA JPL finished installing all these instruments on the pioneering spacecraft, bringing it one major step closer to its launch, which is currently scheduled for October of this year.
“The instruments work together hand in hand to answer our most pressing questions about Europa,” said Dr. Robert Pappalardo, who is the project scientist on Europa Clipper. “We will learn what makes Europa tick, from its core and rocky interior to its ocean and ice shell to its very thin atmosphere and the surrounding space environment.”
The nine instruments that will be responsible for accomplishing the fantastic science during the mission include the Europa Imaging System (EIS), Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS), Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS), Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE), Europa Clipper Magnetometer (ECM), Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS), Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON), MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration/Europa (MASPEX), SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA).
New telescope detects more sources in six months than in the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy.
A unique photograph of the Milky Way galaxy was captured using the IceCube detector, which observes high-energy neutrinos from space.
Windswept piles of dust, or layers of ice? ESA’s Mars Express has revisited one of Mars’s most mysterious features to clarify its composition. Its findings suggest layers of water ice stretching several kilometers below ground—the most water ever found in this part of the planet.
Over 15 years ago, Mars Express studied the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), revealing massive deposits up to 2.5 km deep. From these early observations, it was unclear what the deposits were made of—but new research now has an answer.
“We’ve explored the MFF again using newer data from Mars Express’s MARSIS radar, and found the deposits to be even thicker than we thought: up to 3.7 km thick,” says Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution, U.S., lead author of both the new research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, and the initial 2007 study. “Excitingly, the radar signals match what we’d expect to see from layered ice, and are similar to the signals we see from Mars’s polar caps, which we know to be very ice rich.”
The planet, TOI-715 b, sits within the habitable zone of a star just 137 light-years from Earth.