July 2015 Science Images
New Horizons Team Relieved After Spacecraft Phones Home
It took a little more than thirteen hours after NASA’s New Horizons mission made its historic close encounter with Pluto and its five known moons, but the piano-sized spacecraft finally phoned home to say that it’s OK and that the fly-by went according to plan. Anxious members of the New Horizons mission team at the […]
Pluto Moons Dance in Chaotic Orbit
Pluto and its moons seem to be engaged in a kind of chaotic dance routine with each other. After a thorough analysis of data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA scientists found that Nix and Hydra – two of Pluto’s five known moons – are wobbling and behaving erratically as they orbit the distant […]
Science Scanner: Voters Say Pluto is a Planet, Sense of Touch Explored, Promising New Way to Stop Spread of Cancer, High-Tech Bracelet Secures Computers
People Vote to Make Pluto a Planet Again Until 2006, school children were taught – and most people considered the matter settled – that Pluto is one of the nine planets of the solar system. But that year members of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) – which is responsible for naming and classifying celestial objects […]
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. […]
New-found Planet Defies Scientific Theory
A newly-discovered planet outside of our solar system has scientists rethinking how planets form. The international research team said the new exoplanet, with the registration number HD 106906b, is not only huge, weighing 11 times Jupiter’s mass, but also orbits its sun from a distance of 650 au’s – astronomical units or 97,238,615,955 km. In […]