SPACE
& SCIENCE NEWS: August 2004
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Remnants of 1994 comet impact leave puzzle
at Jupiter
(Aug 24, 2004)
Jupiter's atmosphere still contains remnants of a comet impact from
a decade ago, but scientists said last week they are puzzled by how
two substances have spread into different locations. The new study
also discovered two previously undetected chemicals in Jupiter's air.
Grasping what chemical compounds are in and above the Jovian clouds
and how they move about could help scientists understand planets outside
our solar system, too, said the researchers who produced the work.
Read
more. Source: space.com |
Antarctic craters reveal strike
(Aug 22, 2004)
Scientists have mapped enormous impact craters hidden under the Antarctic
ice sheet using satellite technology. The craters may have either
come from an asteroid between 5 and 11km across that broke up in the
atmosphere, a swarm of comets or comet fragments. The space impacts
created multiple craters over an area of 2,092 km (1300 miles) by
3,862 km (2,400 miles). The scientists told a conference this week
that the impacts occurred roughly 780,000 years ago during an ice
age.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Mars hill find hints at wet past
(Aug 20, 2004)
The US space agency's robotic rover Spirit has found more evidence
that water washed and altered the rocks it has been studying on the
Red Planet. The vehicle is examining the geology of an outcrop at
Columbia Hills named Clovis, which shows chemical and physical signs
of alteration by water. Sprit's twin, Opportunity, has now completed
its transect of rocks in a large crater on the other side of Mars.
NASA says both rovers continue to work well as they move into Mars'
winter.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Unique moon may partner Sedna
(Aug 19, 2004)
The mystery surrounding Sedna – the most distant object ever
seen in the Solar System – deepened as astronomers calculated
that the planetoid's "missing" moon must belong to an entirely new
class of celestial object, and is possibly the darkest body in the
Solar System. When Sedna was spotted in November 2003 it was the largest
object found since the discovery of Pluto. It has puzzled astronomers
because it rotates just once every 20 days. Slow rotation usually
indicates the presence of a moon, which would put a brake on the planetoid's
rotation by exerting tidal forces on it.
Read
more. Source: New Scientist |
Five new moons for Neptune
(Aug 19, 2004)
Five new satellites – and one candidate moon – have been
discovered orbiting the giant planet Neptune, bringing its tally of
moons to 13. Two orbit in the same direction as the planet rotates,
while the orbits of the others are opposite to Neptune's spin. The
tiny outer satellites are probably captured asteroids, astronomers
say. Cataclysmic events connected to the capture of Neptune's moon
Triton were thought to have destroyed any outer satellites the planet
once had.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Stars reveal the Milky Way's age
(Aug 18, 2004)
Astronomers have used measurements from two distant stars to come
up with an age for our galaxy, the Milky Way. A team working with
the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile report that our galaxy is
13,600 million years old, give or take 800 million years. This was
determined by measuring the amount of the element beryllium in two
stars in a so-called globular cluster.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Cassini finds new Saturn moons
(Aug 17, 2004)
The Cassini-Huygens mission in orbit around Saturn has discovered
two new moons around the ringed planet. The new discoveries take Saturn's
total tally of natural satellites to 33. The moons are about 3 km
(2 miles) and 4 km (2.5 miles) across and located 194,000km (120,000
miles) and 211,000 km (131,000 miles) from Saturn's centre. They are
provisionally named S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2 though one of the new
moons may have been spotted before in a single image from the Voyager
probe.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Forming galaxy cluster captured
(Aug 16, 2004)
The Chandra X-ray Observatory has caught enormous hot gas clouds in
space in the act of merging to form a single massive galaxy cluster.
The clouds, which are many millions of degrees Celsius in temperature,
each contain hundreds of galaxies. The gas complex, known as Abell
2125, is about three billion light-years from Earth and is seen at
a time about 11 billion years after the Big Bang.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
Closing in on planet formation
(Aug 15, 2004)
An astronomer in the US has taken the sharpest ever image of the dust
disk around a nearby star and seen "clumps" of material that could
be evidence for new planets forming. Michael Liu of the University
of Hawaii used the Keck II telescope in Hawaii to observe a young
star called AU Microscopii, and says that the results could help shed
light on the formation of planets (M Liu 2004 Sciencexpress
1102929).
Read
more. Source: PhysicsWeb |
Hubble peers at celestial bubble
(Aug 13, 2004)
The Hubble Space Telescope has peered inside a bubble of interstellar
gas and dust that being inflated by a hurricane of particles emitted
from a young star. This nearby star, which has no name, is losing
100 million times more mass per second than our own Sun, generating
a torrent of speeding particles. Because the star is surrounded by
an envelope of gas the particle train, or stellar wind, collides with
the gas. This pushes it out forming a bubble of the type seen in the
Hubble image.
Read
more. Source: BBC |
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