Where are Ceres Large Craters?
After NASA’s Dawn spacecraft had passed by the asteroid Vesta, on its way to rendezvous with Ceres, mission scientists noticed that its surface was banged up with a lot of very large craters. Its biggest impact crater is Rheasilvia, which measures 505 km in diameter. They expected that Ceres would also be seriously pitted with giant impact basins too. […]
They’re Sure It Exists, But Scientists Still Unable to Detect Dark Matter
Back in 1933, Caltech astronomer and astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky was observing the Coma cluster, a large group of galaxies located some 321 million light years away in the Coma Berenices constellation. He noticed the speed of the galaxies rotating within the cluster was much faster than the quantity of its mass he had calculated. According to […]
Space Snow Spotted; Frankenstein Galaxy; Fewer Allergies for Thumb Suckers
Astronomers Spot Snow Circling New Star For the first time, astronomers have been able to get a glimpse of a water “snowline” in a protoplanetary disk, which is the material surrounding a new star that may later form into planets. This water “snowline” marks the point within these left overs of star formation where the temperature […]
June 2016 Science Images
Black Hole Awakens; Mozart Lowers B.P.; Baby Planet Found
Scientists Observe Awakening of Dormant Super Massive Black Hole Scientists say that, in the known universe, about 90% of the biggest black holes are dormant, which means they aren’t ravenously devouring matter. Because they’re dormant these black holes aren’t pumping out radiation or any kind of light. But all it takes is for a star […]
Did our Sun Snatch Planet 9 from Another Solar System?
Is it possible that the new-found theoretical Planet 9 is actually an exoplanet, a planet from another solar system? According to astronomers at Sweden’s Lund University, it’s “highly likely” that Planet 9 was actually “snatched” from another solar system by our young sun some 4.5 billion years ago, or within 100 million years after its formation. […]
Mars Makes Closest Approach to Earth in More Than a Decade
Do you want to get a good look at Mars? Well now is the time to catch the Red Planet as it makes its closest approach to Earth in the past eleven years. Every 26 months in an event called an opposition by astronomers – Mars and the Sun happen to be on opposite sides […]
April 2016 Science Images
Learning More About Mysterious Planet 9
Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology generated a lot of excitement in the science world back in January when they announced that they had found evidence of a giant planet traveling in an odd, drawn-out orbit in the far reaches of the solar system. So far the new found planet, […]
Astronomers Spot 80 of the Oldest Galaxies
Advancing technology is making it possible for scientists to investigate the early universe. About 200 million years after the Big Bang, it is thought that clumps of condensed primordial cold gas clouds provided material for the first stars to be born. As stars were created they formed small galaxies. An international team of researchers are […]