Weather conditions at Kennedy Space Center will be iffy for SpaceX and NASA’s planned launch of a Cargo Dragon to the ISS, the Space Force said.
Category: space – Page 683
What You Need to Know About Saturn’s Moon Titan
😯 Earth isn’t the only place with rivers, lakes & seas. Saturn’s moon Titan has them, too — not of water, but liquid methane & ethane! This frigid world even hides a liquid water ocean deep beneath its surface.
Here’s what you need to know about Titan: https://go.nasa.gov/2Jost2M
Astronomers spotted colliding neutron stars that may have formed a magnetar
Astronomers may have witnessed the formation of a kind of rapidly spinning, extremely magnetized stellar corpse for the first time.
A mysterious object is hurtling towards Earth, and scientists don’t know what it is
This is an “extremely close,” albeit safe, approach, with the object passing at a distance equivalent to around 13 percent of the average distance between our planet and the moon, astronomer Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project told Newsweek.
The object, which is estimated to measure between 15–33 feet across, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey based in Maui, Hawaii, on September 17, 2020. This find was confirmed two days later by the Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for the designation of minor bodies in the solar system.
Initial observations suggested that the object was an asteroid. But scientists at CNEOS soon began to suspect that 2020 SO was not a normal asteroid.
Art Meets Exoplanets: New Book Offers Window Onto Exo-Worlds
Shockingly, Carroll notes that if our own Earth had formed just one percent farther away from the Sun, it would have suffered a runaway glaciation. By contrast, one percent further in and Earth would have suffered a runaway greenhouse and the fate that befell present-day Venus. “The habitable zone is a planetary tightrope,” writes Carroll.
However, the book does cover the possibility that super-earths and/or gas giant planets that lie in their parent stars’ habitable zones might also harbor planet-sized moons. As the book notes, it’s an idea that Hollywood director James Cameron’s embraced in his ground-breaking movie “Avatar.”
“Envisioning Exoplanets” also offers the reader capsule summaries of the various detection techniques that astronomers have used through the years to remotely explore and characterize these far-flung worlds.