Hormone Cuts Sugar Craving; inSight Launch Delayed; Space Telescope Mirrors
Hormone Cuts Sugar Craving in Mice For those of us with an active “sweet tooth”, it can be really difficult to resist sweet treats like candy, cake and cookies. But with diseases and conditions associated with eating sugary foods like diabetes, heart disease and obesity at or near epidemic levels it’s important not to overindulge […]
New Maps Reveal Red Spot Changes and Odd New Features on Jupiter
Scientists have created two new maps of Jupiter with data and images gathered over a nearly 21-hour period on January 19, 2015 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s high performance Wide Field Camera 3. The maps are a representation of two nearly continuous rotations of the Jovian planet. The maps and series of images will […]
Scientists Find Jupiter’s Younger Sibling
A group of scientists have discovered a new exoplanet they say resembles a young Jupiter. Called 51 Eridani b, the gas giant is about 100 light years away, has twice the mass of Jupiter, orbits its star – 51 Eridani – at a distance comparable to between Saturn and Uranus in our solar system and […]
Saturn Moon’s Wobble Could Be Clue to What’s Inside
Scientists with NASA’s Cassini Mission, which has been studying Saturn since 2004, were trying to figure out just how much one of its moons, Mimas, wobbled as it orbits the ringed planet. After reviewing and analyzing copious images snapped by the robotic probe and running several models, the scientists think the moon’s wobble could be […]
Giant Jovian Moon Might Have an Ocean and Ice ‘Club Sandwich’
Ganymede is Jupiter’s largest moon; in fact it’s the solar system’s biggest moon. Now members of the Icy Worlds team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) think that the giant moon, which is even larger than the planet Mercury, may have several layers of ice and liquid oceans piled atop each other, much like a […]
Coldest-Ever Brown Dwarf Star Discovered
The coldest-ever brown dwarf star has been found about 7 light-years away from Earth and could help scientist learn more about the atmospheres of planets. Brown dwarfs are objects that are too big to be planets, but too small to be considered stars. They begin their lives like stars, but since their mass is so […]
Planetary Scientists Get Into Balloon Game
A new device developed by NASA will help planetary scientists take advantage of high altitude research balloons, a relatively inexpensive observational platform that has long been used by other scientists. The balloons, which can climb to the edge of space, have been utilized by researchers across multiple scientific disciplines, helping them to make groundbreaking findings. […]
Evidence of Water Vapor Found on Dwarf Planet Ceres
Scientists have found signs of water vapor on the dwarf planet known as Ceres. “This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere,” said Michael Küppers of the European Space Agency. […]
Scientists Strike ‘Scientific Gold’ in California
While in space and orbiting the sun this celestial body is an asteroid. It’s a meteor as its entering earth’s atmosphere, like a fireball flashing across the sky and a meteorite is the actual object that made it to Earth.
See Jupiter’s Newly-discovered Tiny Moon in Motion
Astronomers have found that one of two recently-discovered moons of Jupiter is just two kilometers in diameter and may be the smallest of Jupiter’s 67 satellites. Back in September 2010, scientists discovered two unknown distant satellites of Jupiter while conducting routine tracking observations of the planet’s previously identified moons. To confirm that these were indeed […]