Space and astronomy news
Saturn’s rings are one of the most well-known features throughout astronomy. While much is known about them, they still make headlines from time to time. This includes a recent study involving an international team of researchers that could help paint a clearer picture of the interaction between the gas giant and the massive ring system that encircles it.
Continue reading “Saturn’s Rings Warm Up its Atmosphere”
In the vastness of space, astronomers are likely to find instances of almost every astronomical phenomena if they look hard enough. Many planetary phenomena are starting to come into sharper focus as the astronomy community continues to focus on finding exoplanets. Now a team led by Yifan Zhou at UT Austin has directly imaged a gas giant still in formation.
Continue reading “Astronomers are Watching a gas Giant Grow, Right in Front of Their Eyes”
Venus really sucks. It’s as hot as an oven with a dense, poisonous atmosphere. But how did it get that way?
Venus sucks. Seriously, it’s the worst. The global temperature is as hot as an oven, the atmospheric pressure is 90 times Earth, and it rains sulfuric acid. Every part of the surface of Venus would kill you dead in moments.
Let’s push Venus into the Sun and be done with that terrible place. Its proximity is lowering our real estate values and who knows what sort of interstellar monstrosities are going to set up shop there, and be constantly knocking on our door to borrow the mower, or a cup or sugar, or sneak into our yard at night and eat all our dolphins.
You might argue that Venus is worth saving because it’s located within the Solar System’s habitable zone, that special place where water could exist in a liquid state on the surface. But we’re pretty sure it doesn’t have any liquid water. Venus may have been better in the past, clearly it started hanging out with wrong crowd, taking a bad turn down a dark road leading it to its current state of disrepair.
Could Venus have been better in the past? And how did it go so wrong? In many ways, Venus is a twin of the Earth. It’s almost the same size and mass as the Earth, and it’s made up of roughly the same elements. And if you stood on the surface of Venus, in the brief moments before you evacuated your bowels and died horribly, you’d notice the gravity feels pretty similar.
In the ancient past, the Sun was dimmer and cooler than it is now. Cool enough that Venus was much more similar to Earth with rivers, lakes and oceans. NASA’s Pioneer spacecraft probed beneath the planet’s thick clouds and revealed that there was once liquid water on the surface of Venus. And with liquid water, there could have been life on the surface and in those oceans.
Here’s where Venus went wrong. It’s about a third closer to the Sun than Earth, and gets roughly double the solar radiation. The Sun has been slowly heating up over the millions and billions of years. At some point, the planet reached a tipping point, where the water on the surface of Venus completely evaporated into the atmosphere.
Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, and this only increased the global temperature, creating a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus. The ultraviolet light from the Sun split apart the water vapor into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen was light enough to escape the atmosphere of Venus into space, while the oxygen recombined with carbon to form the thick carbon dioxide atmosphere we see today. Without that hydrogen, Venus’ water is never coming back.
Are you worried about our changing climate doing that here? Don’t panic. The amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere of Venus is incomprehensible. According to the IPCC, the folks studying global warming, human activities have no chance of unleashing runaway global warming. We’ll just have the regular old, really awful global warming. So, it’s okay to panic a bit, but do it in the productive way that results in your driving your car less.
The Sun is still slowly heating up. And in a billion years or so, temperatures here will get hot enough to boil the oceans away. And then, Earth and Venus will be twins again and then we can push them both into the Sun.
I know, I said the words “climate change”. Feel free to have an argument in the comments below, but play nice and bring science.
Earth’s galactic next-door neighbors shine brighter than ever in new pictures taken by an orbiting telescope, focusing on ultraviolet light that is tricky to image from the surface.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) — the two largest major galaxies near our own, the Milky Way — were imaged in 5.4 days and 1.8 days of cumulative exposure time, respectively. These produced two gorgeous, high-resolution photos in a spot of the light spectrum normally invisible to humans.
“Prior to these images, there were relatively few UV observations of these galaxies, and none at high resolution across such wide areas, so this project fills in a major missing piece of the scientific puzzle,” stated Michael Siegel, lead scientist for Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope at the Swift Mission Operations Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Science isn’t interested in these pictures — taken in wavelengths ranging from 1,600 to 3,300 angstroms, mostly blocked in Earth’s atmosphere — because of their pretty face, however. Ultraviolet light pictures let the hottest stars and star-forming areas shine out, while in visible light those hotspots are suppressed.
“With these mosaics, we can study how stars are born and evolve across each galaxy in a single view, something that’s very difficult to accomplish for our own galaxy because of our location inside it,” stated Stefan Immler, an associate research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the lead of the SWIFT guest investigator program.
Although the galaxies are relatively small, they easily shine in our night sky because they’re so close to Earth — 163,000 light-years for the LMC, and 200,000 light years for the SMC.
The LMC is only about 1/10 of the Milky Way’s size, with 1% of the Milky Way’s mass. The punier SMC is half of LMC’s size with only two-thirds of that galaxy’s mass.
Immler revealed the large images — 160 megapixels for the LMC, and 57 megapixels for the SMC — at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis on Monday (June 3.)
Source: NASA