Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery, but this position has come under threat with the discovery of 2003 UB313 (aka Xena), an object larger than Pluto orbiting out further in the Solar System. The International Astronomical Union will be meeting in August to decide on the fate of Pluto. By September, we could have 8 or 10 planets in the Solar System, but there won’t be 9 any more.
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Enceladus Passes Before Titan
This natural colour photograph from Cassini shows Saturn’s moon Enceladus passing in front of Titan. With this colour view, it’s easy to see how different these two moons are. Titan has its golden, smoggy atmosphere, while Enceladus is mostly gray, darkened ice. Cassini took this image on February 5, 2006 when it was 4.1 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Enceladus.
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Magnetic Fields Help Black Holes Pull In Matter
Even though the gravity from black holes is so strong that light can’t even escape, we can see the radiation from the superheated matter that’s about to be consumed. Until now, scientists haven’t been able to explain how all this matter continuously falls into the black hole – it should just orbit, like planets going around a star. New data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows that a black hole’s powerful magnetic field creates a turbulence in surrounding matter that helps drive it inward to be consumed.
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Everything’s on the Menu for Supermassive Black Holes
The supermassive black holes that lurk at the heart of most galaxies have enormous appetites. They’ve already consumed millions of times the mass of our own Sun, and they’re not done yet. Everything’s on the menu: mostly gas, dust, planets and stars, but the occasional exotic delicacy gets consumed too. “Compact objects”, such as stellar mass black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs occasionally fall into their grasp too. But these objects don’t go with a whimper; they make screams we’ll soon hear across intergalactic space.
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The Clearest Skies on Earth
Telescopes are perched at the tops of mountains because the air up there is thinner, drier and clearer than the view from sea level. But the best views of all are near the south pole in Antarctica, in a region called Dome C. With its high altitude, low temperatures, and crystal clear skies, Dome C boasts nearly perfect viewing conditions. A team of French astronomers are hoping to build a trio of telescopes that work together as a single, large telescope as a prototype. But they’ve got their sights set on a larger installation that could rival the capabilities of the best telescopes on Earth. It’s all about location, location, location.
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Phoenix Lander is Coming Together
NASA’s next mission to the surface of the Red Planet is the Phoenix Mars Lander, due for launch in August 2007. This week, engineers at the Phoenix Science Operations Center at the University of Arizona began connecting science payload instruments to a mock lander to see how well the components work with each other. Phoenix will touch down onto the surface of Mars in 2008, and examine the soil for evidence of past water, and to see if the habitat has the potential to support life.
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Dione Passes in Front of Rhea
This photograph, captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, shows Saturn’s moon Dione crossing the face of Rhea. Dione is on the right, and it’s about two-thirds the size of Rhea, and it has a much smoother surface, suggesting it has been modified more recently. The image was taken on May 14, 2006 at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Dione.
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Fizzing Space Around the Earth
New observations from ESA’s Cluster and Double Star spacecraft have found that that space around the Earth fizzes as bubbles of superheated gas are created and popped. These bubbles are known as density holes, and they occur when gas in a region drops in density, but rises in temperature. The European spacecraft encountered these bubbles on the day-lit side of Earth at an altitude of 13-19 Earth radii. Scientists aren’t exactly sure what’s causing these bubbles, but it has something to do with the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind.
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NASA Announces STS-120 Crew
NASA has announced the crew of astronauts that will fly the space shuttle for mission STS-120. This mission will launch the Italian-built Node 2 connecting module to the International Space Station. The commander is Air Force Col. Pamela A. Melroy; the second woman to lead a shuttle mission. The flight mission specialists will be Scott E. Parazynski, Army Col. Douglas H. Wheelock, Navy Capt. Michael J. Foreman and Paolo A. Nespoli, a European Space Agency astronaut from Italy.
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Distant Quasars are Natural Particle Accelerators
An international team of astronomers has gathered new data that helps to explain the origins of quasar particle jets. These are enormous jets, hundreds of thousands of light-years long, emanating from the supermassive black holes at the heart of distant galaxies. They’re mysterious because the energy of particles they emit goes down across the length of the jet. This new theory proposes that the jets are emitting particles through synchrotron radiation; where the environment close to the black hole acts as a natural particle accelerator.
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