Uranus – the giant gas world, located 2.8 million kilometers from the Sun – is quite stormy. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of these storms, floating in the green-blue atmosphere of the Planet. Literally, the entire North Pole is occupied by hurricane! “Scientists believe this new feature of Uranus is the result of its unique rotation,” NASA writes. Unlike all other planets in the Solar System, Uranus is tipped on its side. This means that the Sun has been shining the North Pole constantly during the local long summer. And this in turn leads to widespread atmospheric...
Why does time seem to move forward? It’s a riddle that’s puzzled physicists for well over a century, and they’ve come up with numerous theories to explain time’s arrow. The latest, though, suggests that while time moves forward in our universe, it may run backwards in another, mirror universe that was created on the “other side” of the Big Bang. Two leading theories propose to explain the direction of time by way of the relatively uniform conditions of the Big Bang. At the very start, what is now the universe was homogeneously hot, so much so that matter didn’t really...
Our home galaxy is not the thin, clean spiral we had envisioned. Researchers created the first 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy and figured out what makes it warped and twisted. So, we now know that the Milky Way isn’t flat. Scientists from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia have published a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy revealing an unprecedented 3D map of the galaxy we live in. The scientists used the locations of 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the outline of the Milky Way galaxy called Classical Cepheids....
On Jan. 19, 2019, just 161 days after its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe completed its first orbit of the Sun, reaching the point in its orbit farthest from our star, called aphelion. The spacecraft has now begun the second of 24 planned orbits, on track for its second perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun, on April 4, 2019. Parker Solar Probe entered full operational status (known as Phase E) on Jan. 1, with all systems online and operating as designed. The spacecraft has been delivering data from its instruments to...
The process responsible for the formation of the Earth does not imply the existence of key ingredients for life. New research, however, shows how our planet probably has acquired them. Scientists are saying a Mars-sized planet has hit the Earth about 4.4 billion years ago. On the one hand, it served as a “donor” to the important ingredients for life, as its core was rich in sulfur. On the other – it has led to the formation of the Moon, our natural companion. Experiments prove that much of the nitrogen and carbon of the Earth is the result of this...
A meteorite hit the moon during Monday’s total lunar eclipse The impact happened at 4:41:38 am GMT exactly, or 11:41:38 pm ET 21 January, 2019 The confirmation of the impact came this morning from the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System (MIDAS), a project developed by the University of Huelva and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia. MIDAS uses three observatories to capture transient events happening on the surface of the Moon. Monitoring these impacts is very important. By learning about what is hitting the lunar surface we can better understand the space environment around the Earth-Moon system. Plus it...
The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) If you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second. Thanks to the work of Albert Einstein and others, we now understand light speed to be a theoretical limit: light speed — a constant called “c” — is thought to be not achievable by anything with mass. Is the speed of light really constant?Light travels in waves, and, like sound, can be slowed depending on what it is traveling through. Let’s Start A new...
Jupiter is not only the biggest planet in the Solar System. A new study of astronomers from Laurence Livermore’s Californian Laboratory, and the University of Munster in Germany, defines Jupiter as the oldest planet in the solar system, Space.com reports. The new analysis of the Planet calculates that the core of Jupiter was 20 times larger than the Earth only 1 million years after the formation of the Sun. This is a fairly short time because young stars usually throw a lot of energy in their first years, which is enough to blow dust and gas to prevent the formation...
