During April 2017 Jupiter is in opposition: it is at its closest to Earth and the hemisphere facing Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope used this special configuration to capture an ...
Space Exploration
Apr 6, 2017
0
118
NASA's Jupiter-circling spacecraft is stuck making long laps around the gas giant because of sticky valves.
Space Exploration
Feb 23, 2017
0
37
New planetary formation models from Carnegie's Alan Boss indicate that there may be an undiscovered population of gas giant planets orbiting around Sun-like stars at distances similar to those of Jupiter and Saturn. His work ...
Astronomy
Feb 21, 2017
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293
About 4.6 billion years ago, an enormous cloud of hydrogen gas and dust collapsed under its own weight, eventually flattening into a disk called the solar nebula. Most of this interstellar material contracted at the disk's ...
Space Exploration
Feb 9, 2017
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24
Can helium bond with other elements to form a stable compound? Students attentive to Utah State University professor Alex Boldyrev's introductory chemistry lectures would immediately respond "no." And they'd be correct – ...
Materials Science
Feb 6, 2017
1
1976
For the first time since the twin Voyager spacecraft missions in 1979, scientists have produced far-infrared maps of Jupiter using NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA. These maps were created from ...
Space Exploration
Jan 5, 2017
1
639
Signs of powerful changing winds have been detected on a planet 16 times larger than Earth, over 1000 light years away - the first time ever that weather systems have been found on a gas giant outside our solar system - according ...
Astronomy
Dec 12, 2016
10
502
On Sunday, December 11, at 9:04 a.m. PST (12:04 p.m. EST, 17:04 UTC) NASA's Juno spacecraft will make its third science flyby of Jupiter.
Space Exploration
Dec 9, 2016
10
1450
Astronomers studying a cluster of still-forming protogalaxies seen as they were more than 10 billion years ago have found that a giant galaxy in the center of the cluster is forming from a surprisingly-dense soup of molecular ...
Astronomy
Dec 1, 2016
4
637
When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch the star partway through ...
Astronomy
Sep 26, 2016
0
24
