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Mars Base

Largest Sunspot in Years Observed on Sun | Solar Storms, Flares & Sunspots | Space Weat... - 0 views

www.space.com/unspot-years-observed-sun.html

scibyte20 sun storms

shared by Mars Base on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The massive sunspot, called AR1339, is about 50,000 miles (80,000 km) long, and 25,000 miles (40,000 km) wide
  • Earth itself is only 8,000 miles (12,800 km) wide
  • The sunspot behemoth isn't yet facing our planet, but was spotted today (Nov. 3) by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The sunspot is actually a group of nearby darkened spots on the sun, some of which are individually wider than planet Earth
  • a huge sunspot like AR1339 comes with a large potential for solar flares
  • the spot has already produced one class M4 solar flare on Nov. 2 that was observed by SDO. A large coronal mass ejection from this flare was observed, but it was not directed toward Earth. However, as the sunspot turns toward our planet in the coming days, we may be in for a greater chance of these ejections.
Mars Base

Two 'Weird' Alien Planets Found Around Bright, Distant Stars | Space.com - 1 views

www.space.com/ets-kelt-telescope-aas220.html

scibyte52 exoplanets

shared by Mars Base on 19 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Astronomers using a small ground-based telescope have discovered two unusual alien planets around extremely bright, distant stars.
  • detected using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) in southern Arizona, which has a lens that is roughly as powerful as a high-end digital camera
  • slightly more diminutive than Kepler
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • KELT-1b, is a massive world that is both incredibly hot and dense. The alien planet, which is mostly metallic hydrogen, is slightly larger than Jupiter, but contains a whopping 27 times the mass
  • completes one orbit in a mere 29 hours
  • surface temperature is likely above 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 2,200 degrees Celsius
  • receiving 6,000 times the amount of radiation that Earth receives from the sun
  • located approximately 825 light-years away in the constellation of Andromeda
  • massive enough that KELT-1 has raised tides on its parent star and actually spun it
  • both KELT-1 and its parent star are locked in each other's gaze as they go around."
  • KELT-2Ab, and is located about 360 light-years away in the constellation of Auriga
  • 30 percent larger than Jupiter with 50 percent more mass.
  • KELT-2Ab's parent star is so bright it can be seen from Earth through binoculars
  • the star is so luminous that researchers will be able to make direct observations of the planet's atmosphere by examining light that shines through it when the star passes within KELT North's field of view again in November.
  • Follow-up observations are also being planned
  • as well as several space observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope.
  • orbits a star that is slightly bigger than the sun, within a binary system
  • one star is slightly bigger than our sun, and the other star is slightly smaller. KELT-2Ab orbits the bigger star, which is bright enough to be seen from Earth with binoculars
  • using the so-called transit method, which involves watching for tiny dips in the star's light that could indicate a planet is crossing, or transiting
  • Rather than staring at a small group of stars at high resolution, the twin KELT North and KELT South telescopes observe millions of very bright stars at low resolution,
  • KELT North scans the northern sky from Arizona
  • KELT South covers the southern sky from Cape Town, South Africa.
  • small ground-based KELT telescopes provide a low-cost alternative for exoplanet hunters by primarily using off-the-shelf technology. The hardware for a KELT telescope costs less than $75,000
Mars Base

Star is discovered to be a close neighbor of the Sun and the coldest of its kind - 0 views

phys.org/...neighbor-sun-coldest-kind.html

scibyte128 star

shared by Mars Base on 27 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind—as frosty as Earth's North Pole—has been discovered
  • Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun
  • Brown dwarfs start their lives like stars, as collapsing balls of gas, but they lack the mass to burn nuclear fuel and radiate starlight
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The newfound coldest brown dwarf, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, has a chilly temperature between minus 54 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 48 to minus 13 degrees Celsius).
  • Although it is very close to our solar system
  • is not an appealing destination for human space travel in the distant future.
  • WISE was able to spot the rare object because it surveyed the entire sky twice in infrared light
  • Cool objects like brown dwarfs can be invisible when viewed by visible-light telescopes, but their thermal glow—even if feeble—stands out in infrared light.
  • is estimated to be 3 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
  • With such a low mass, it could be a gas giant similar to Jupiter that was ejected from its star system. But scientists estimate it is probably a brown dwarf rather than a planet since brown dwarfs are known to be fairly common
  • If so, it is one of the least massive brown dwarfs known.
  • Combined detections
  • ken from different positions around the Sun, enabled the measurement of its distance through the parallax effect
  • In March of 2013
  • analysis of the images from WISE uncovered a pair of much warmer brown dwarfs at a distance of 6.5 light years, making that system the third closest to the Sun
  • NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes.
Mars Base

Did NASA's Voyager 1 Spacecraft Just Exit the Solar System? | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/r-spacecraft-solar-system.html

scibyte66 scibyte67 Voyager1

shared by Mars Base on 09 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists are crunching one more set of numbers to find out for sure.
  • New data from the spacecraft indicate that the historic moment of its exit from the solar system might have come and gone two months ago
  • For two years now, data beamed back to Earth by Voyager 1 has hinted at its close approach to the edge of the solar system, a pressure boundary called the heliopaus
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • bubble of electrically charged particles blowing outward from the sun (called the heliosphere) exactly counterbalances the inward pressure of the gas and dust from interstellar space, causing equilibrium between the two
  • scientists have had trouble figuring out what, exactly, happens at or near this boundary — making it hard to tell whether Voyager has crossed it
  • In 2010, Voyager passed the point where the solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outward from the sun, seemed to
  • indicated that the wind had suddenly died down, and all the surrounding solar particles were at a standstill
  • "stagnation region" came as a surprise
  • expected to see the solar wind veer sideways
  • the perplexing collapse of the solar wind at the edge of the heliosphere left them without a working model for the outer solar system
  • no well-established criteria of what constitutes exit from the heliosphere
  • "All theoretical models have been found wanting."
  • a space scientist at Johns Hopkins who works with Voyager 1 data, said that in any model of the heliopause, an object exiting through it should experience three changes: a sharp rise in the number of collisions with cosmic rays (high-energy particles from space), a dramatic drop in the number of collisions with charged particles from the sun, and a change in the direction of the surrounding magnetic field.
  • Based on two of those criteria, Voyager 1 looks as if it passed through the heliopause at the end of the summer
  • The level of these cosmic ray collisions jumped significantly in late August.
  • spacecraft has experienced a steady rise in the number of collisions with particles whose energies are greater than 70 Mega-electron-volts, indicating they are probably cosmic rays emanating from supernova explosions far beyond the solar system
  • in late August, cosmic ray collisions sharply rose, and solar particle collisions sharply fell: two indicators of a transition through the heliopause
  • To officially declare Voyager's crossing, the scientists need to check if the third condition holds
  • change in magnetic field direction
  • e interstellar field beyond the influence of the sun) is critical because, even though there is debate among astrophysicists as to what direction the field will lie in
  • unlikely that it is the direction that we have been seeing at Voyager 1 throughout the most recent years
  • scientists could not say when the magnetic field analysis would be finished. But when it is
  • Once we have a consensus within the team we will inform NASA for a proper announcement,
Mars Base

Astronomers Hint that our Sun won't Terminate as the Typical Planetary Nebula - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...s-the-typical-planetary-nebula

scibyte91 sun

shared by Mars Base on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Textbooks often cite that planetary nebulae (PNe, plural) represent an endstate for lower-mass single stars
  • recent research suggests that most PNe stem from binary systems
  • The lowest mass star theorized to form the typical PN is near 1 solar mass, and thus without a companion the Sun may not surpass the mass limit required to generate the hot glowing (ionized) nebula typically tied to PNe
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • New research continues to question our original understanding of how the Sun’s life may end.
  • while the binary interaction model explains some of the anomalies associated with the observed planetary nebula population, this theory awaits final confirmation
  • The traditional theory
  • does not provide a natural explanation for the non-spherical
  • observed for the great majority
Mars Base

Voyager 1 may have left the solar system - 0 views

phys.org/...012-10-voyager-left-solar.html

scibyte67 Voyager1

shared by Mars Base on 11 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • there's no official word from NASA
  • the buzz
  • is that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • evidence comes from this graph, above, which shows the number of particles, mainly protons, from the Sun hitting Voyager 1 across time
  • uge drop at the end of August hints that Voyager 1 may now be in interstellar space
  • on July 28, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our Solar System dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels. But then the bottom dropped out at the end of August.
  • Voyager team has said they have been seeing two of three key signs of changes expected to occur at the boundary of interstellar space
  • drop in particles from the Sun
  • jump in the level of high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our Solar System.
  • third key sign would be the direction of the magnetic field
  • No word on that yet, but scientists are eagerly analyzing the data to see whether that has, indeed, changed direction
  • Scientists expect that all three of these signs will have changed when Voyager 1 has crossed into interstellar space.
  • Voyager project scientist for the entire mission, who was quoted in early August. "We are certainly in a new region at the edge of the solar system where things are changing rapidly. But we are not yet able to say that Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space."
  • the data are changing in ways that the team didn't expect, "but Voyager has always surprised us with new discoveries."
  • Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977, is approximately 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) from the Sun
  • Voyager 2, which launched on Aug. 20, 1977, is close behind, at 15 billion km (9.3 billion miles) from the Sun.
Mars Base

Aurora Oddity: Northern Lights Flare Up Without Big Sun Eruption | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/e-northern-lights-display.html

scibyte34 aurora ymhs

shared by Mars Base on 18 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Northern Lights Display Dazzles Without Big Sun Flare
  • reasons scientists can't yet explain, the northern lights blazed up in a dazzling display this week
  • despite the apparent lack of a major solar flare typically associated with these celestial light shows
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • began on Valentine's Day (Feb. 14),
  • uptick in activity in Earth's magnetic field sparked a geomagnetic storm
  • Sometimes the sky surprises us
  • with little warning, geomagnetic activity rippled around the Arctic Circle
  • producing an outbreak of auroras
  • among the best in months
  • some early speculation that a Feb. 10 sun storm, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), may have triggered the northern lights show, but this solar outburst has not yet been confirmed.
  • occur when charged particles from the sun interact with Earth's upper atmosphere
  • creating ripples of glowing light
  • charged particles are funneled to Earth's poles by the planet's magnetic field
  • typically only visible to skywatchers in far northern or far southern latitudes
  • northern lights are called the aurora borealis
  • southern lights are dubbed the aurora australis
Mars Base

Sugar Molecules Discovered Around Sun-Like Star | Search for Life & Alien Planets | Spa... - 0 views

www.space.com/les-discovered-young-star.html

scibyte61 sugar

shared by Mars Base on 29 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The young star
  • , is part of a binary
  • similar mass to the sun and is located about 400 light-years away
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • sugar molecules, known as glycolaldehyde, have previously been detected in interstellar space
  • according to the researchers, this is the first time they have been spotted so close to a sun-like star
  • the molecules are about the same distance away from the star as the planet Uranus is from our sun.
  • glycolaldehyde, which is a simple form of sugar, not much different to the sugar we put in coffee
  • found the sugar molecules using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile
Mars Base

Solar Flare May Spark Weekend Northern Lights Show | Solar Flares & Northern Lights | S... - 0 views

www.space.com/kend-northern-lights-show.html

scibyte30 sun solar flare CME

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • A powerful flare erupted from the sun Thursday (Jan. 19
  • solar flare occurred at about 11:30 am EST (1600 GMT
  • coronal mass ejection
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • aimed at Earth
  • sun explosion should reach Earth by Saturday night (Jan. 21), and could amp up northern lights
Mars Base

Battered Asteroid Lutetia a Rare Relic of Earth's Birth | Asteroids & Comets | Earth Fo... - 0 views

www.space.com/eroid-lutetia-earth-birth.html

scibyte21 Lutetia

shared by Mars Base on 11 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • The oddball asteroid Lutetia is a rocky remnant of the material that formed Earth, Venus and Mercury about 4.5 billion years ago, a new study suggests
  • Its composition suggests it likely formed close to the sun in the same cloud of material that eventually coalesced into the inner solar system's rocky planets.
  • then it was booted out to its current location in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, most likely after a run-in with a young planet
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Lutetia, which is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) across
  • Lutetia's spectrum matched that of one particular class of meteorite called enstatite chondrites, which are known to date from the early solar system
  • Enstatite chondrites are thought to have formed close to the sun and to have served as building blocks for the rocky planets, especially Earth, Venus and Mercury, researchers said.
  • The implication is that Lutetia also originated close to the sun, not out in the main asteroid belt where it currently sits
  • Lutetia's birthplace makes the space rock pretty special. Astronomers have estimated that just 2 percent of the bodies that formed where it likely did ended up in the main asteroid belt.
Mars Base

Curiosity Captures Mercury from Mars - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ity-captures-mercury-from-mars

scibyte134 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • NASA’s Curiosity rover
  • does get a chance to skygaze on occasion. And while looking at the Sun on June 3, 2014
  • the rover’s Mastcam spotted
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Mercury
  • across the Sun’s face
  • Silhouetted against the bright disk of the Sun, Mercury barely appears as a hazy blur in the filtered Mastcam images
  • it was moving relatively quickly during the transit, passing the darker smudges of two Earth-sized sunspots over the course of several hours.
  • It’s the first time Mercury has ever been imaged from Mars
  • the first time we’ve observed a planet transiting our Sun from another world besides our own
  • this was
  • a carefully calculated observation using the Mastcam’s right 100mm telephoto lens and neutral density filter, which is used to routinely image the Sun in order to measure the dustiness of the Martian atmosphere
Mars Base

Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/alien-planet-direct-image.html

scibyte96 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 03 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A newly discovered gaseous planet has been directly photographed orbiting a star about 300 light-years from Earth
  • this world may be the least massive planet directly observed outside of the solar system,
  • released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO)
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • June 3) depicts the suspected gas giant (called HD 95086 b) circling its young star (named HD 95086) in infrared light
  • HD 95086 b was sighted by ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Based on the planet's brightness, scientists estimate that it is only about four or five times more massive than Jupiter
  • Only a few planets have been directly observed so far
  • The blue circle in the photo represents the distance between the sun and Neptune.
  • The planet orbits its star at about twice the distance from the sun to Neptune and about 56 times the distance between Earth and the sun
  • is relatively young star at only 10 million to 17 million years old, making the formation of the exoplanet and the dusty disc surrounding the star potentially intriguing to researchers
  • It either grew by assembling the rocks that form the solid core and then slowly accumulated gas from the environment to form the heavy atmosphere
  • started forming from a gaseous clump that arose from gravitational instabilities in the disc
  • Interactions between the planet and the disc itself or with other planets may have also moved the planet from where it was born
Mars Base

Should This Alien World Even Exist? This Young Disk Could Challenge Planet-Formation Th... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...enge-planet-formation-theories

scibyte98 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • gap in the cloud? That could be a planet being born some 176 light-years away from Earth
  • small planet, only 6 to 28 times Earth’s mass.
  • This alien world, if we can confirm it, shouldn’t be there according to conventional planet-forming theory
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The gap in the image above — taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — probably arose when a planet under construction swept through the dust and debris in its orbit
  • That’s not much of a surprise (at first blush) given what we think we know about planet formation
  • You start with a cloud of debris and gas swirling around a star, then gradually the bits and pieces start colliding, sticking together and growing bigger into small rocks, bigger ones and eventually, planets or gas giant planet cores
  • this planet is a heck of a long way from its star, TW Hydrae, about twice Pluto’s distance from the sun
  • Given that alien systems’ age, that world shouldn’t have formed so quickly.
  • Astronomers believe that Jupiter took about 10 million years to form at its distance away from the sun
  • This planet near TW Hydrae should take 200 times longer to form because the alien world is moving slower, and has less debris to pick up
  • because TW Hydrae‘s system is believed to be only 8 million years old.
  • TW Hydrae is only 55 percent as massive as our sun
  • astronomers are seriously investigating other theories
  • One alternative brought up in the press release: perhaps part of the disc collapsed due to gravitational instability
  • If that is the case, a planet could come to be in only a few thousand years, instead of several million
  • add to planet formation theories as to how you can actually form a planet very far out
  • If we can actually confirm that there’s a planet there, we can connect its characteristics to measurements of the gap properties
  • direct collapse” theory, though: astronomers believe it takes a bunch of matter that is one to two times more massive than Jupiter before a collapse can occur to form a planet
  • this world is no more than 28 times the mass of Earth, as best as we can figure
  • Jupiter itself is 318 times more massive than Earth
  • There are also intriguing results about the gap
  • dust grains in this system, orbiting nearby the gap, are still smaller than the size of a grain of sand
  • Astronomers plan to use ALMA and the James Webb Space Telescope, which should launch in 2018, to get a better look
Mars Base

Amazing Shots! Shenzhou-10 Docked to Tiangong-1, Transiting the Sun - 1 views

www.universetoday.com/...-tiangong-1-transiting-the-sun

scibyte99 ChineseSpaceProgram

shared by Mars Base on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • less than half a second to capture these incredible shots of the Shenzhou-10 module docked to Tiangong-1 Chinese station transiting across the Sun
  • The Tiangong-1 space station is just 10.4 meters (34.1 ft) in length, while the Shenzou 10 is 9.25 meters (30.35 ft) long
  • The transit duration was just 0.46 seconds
Mars Base

Sun-powered plane waits for better weather to continue trip - 0 views

phys.org/...sun-powered-plane-weather.html

scibyte49 SolarPower

shared by Mars Base on 31 May 12 - No Cached
  • Swiss sun-powered aircraft Solar Impulse is waiting for weather conditions to improve before continuing on its first transcontinental flight, organisers said Wednesday
  • experimental plane, which is not designed to fly into clouds
  • landed in Madrid on Friday
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • end of the first leg of its attempt to reach Morocco without using a drop of fuel.
  • After technical checks and a pilot change it was hoped Solar Impulse would leave for Rabat on Monday but its departure was put off due to strong winds
  • waiting for a good weather forecast window on the Madrid-Rabat leg
  • If successful the 2,500-kilometre (1,550-mile) journey will be the longest to date for the aircraft after a flight to Paris and Brussels last year and it will mark the first time that the plane has left Europe.
  • intended as a rehearsal in the run-up to the plane's round-the-world flight planned for 2014
  • wingspan of a large airliner but weighs no more than a saloon car, is fitted with 12,000 solar cells feeding four electric motors driving propellors
Chris Fisher

Probes Suggest Magnet Bubbles At Solar System Edge - 0 views

voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/...probes_suggest.html

scibyte waves sun magnetic voyager

shared by Chris Fisher on 17 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • While using a new computer model to analyze Voyager data, scientists found the sun's distant magnetic field is made up of bubbles approximately 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) wide.
  • The new model suggests the field lines are broken up into self-contained structures disconnected from the solar magnetic field. The findings are described in the June 9 edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
  • "The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are, the folds of the skirt bunch up."
Mars Base

Astronomers Discover 18 Huge New Alien Planets | Alien Planets & Solar Systems | Gas Gi... - 0 views

www.space.com/en-planets-keck-telescope.html

scibyte24

shared by Mars Base on 03 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Astronomers have found 18 new alien planets, all of them Jupiter-size gas giants that circle stars bigger than our sun
  • increase the number of known planets orbiting massive stars by 50 percent
  • should also help astronomers better understand how giant planets form and grow
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • just a few months after a different team of researchers announced the discovery of 50 newfound alien worlds
  • including one rocky planet that could be a good candidate for life
  • list of known alien planets is now well over 700 and climbing fast
  • researchers surveyed about 300 stars using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and instruments in Texas and Arizona
  • focused on so-called "retired" type A stars that are at least 1.5 times more massive than our own sun
  • just beyond the main stage of life — hence the name "retired"
  • ballooning out to become what's known as subgiant stars
  • scrutinized these stars, looking for slight wobbles caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets
  • revealed 18 new alien worlds
  • All 18 planets also orbit relatively far from their stars, at a distance of at least 0.7 times the span from Earth to the sun (about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers
  • the new finds lend support to one of two theories that attempt to explain the formation and evolution of planets
  • core accretion, posits that planets grow as gas and dust glom onto seed particles in a protoplanetary disk.
  • predicts that the characteristics of a planetary system — the number and size of planets, for example — depend strongly on the mass of the star
  • competing theory, called gravitational collapse, holds that planets form when big clouds of gas and dust in the disk spontaneously collapse into clumps that become planets
  • According to this idea, stellar mass should have little impact on planet size, number and other characteristics
  • it seems that stellar mass does in fact play an important role
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