SDO spots two lunar transits in space

On Sept. 9, 2018, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO, saw two lunar transits as the Moon passed in front of the Sun. A transit happens when a celestial body passes between a larger body and an observer. This first lunar ...

Image: Bright spots on Ceres

Bright surface features on the dwarf planet Ceres known as faculae were first discovered by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in 2015. This mosaic of one such feature, Cerealia Facula, combines images obtained from altitudes as low ...

Bronze Age artifacts used meteoric iron

You may already be surprised to hear there are iron objects dating back to the Bronze Age, but their meteorite origin is even more astonishing. Though meteorites had already been recognized as one source of this metal, the ...

Turbulence in planetary cores excited by tides

Veritable shields against high-energy particles, planets' magnetic fields are produced by iron moving in their liquid core. Yet the dominant model for explaining this system does not fit the smallest celestial bodies. Researchers ...

Minor planet named Bernard

A minor planet in the solar system will officially be known as Bernardbowen from today after Australian citizen science project theSkyNet won a competition to name the celestial body.

Presumed young star turns out to be a galactic senior citizen

49 Lib, a relatively bright star in the southern sky, is 12 billion years old rather than just 2.3 billion. For many decades, researchers were stumped by conflicting data pertaining to this celestial body, because they had ...

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