See Astronomy Now
Astronomers searching for a hypothesised large planet in the outer Solar System far beyond Pluto stumbled across 12 previously undetected moons orbiting Jupiter, pushing the giant planet’s total to a record 79.
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See Astronomy Now
Astronomers searching for a hypothesised large planet in the outer Solar System far beyond Pluto stumbled across 12 previously undetected moons orbiting Jupiter, pushing the giant planet’s total to a record 79.
On a similar theme - Hubble has discovered a dozen previously unknown moons going round Jupiter:
From: Astronomy Now <[email protected]>
Subject: 12 new moons found orbiting Jupiter
Date: 17 July 2018 at 20:07:44 GMT+2
Reply-To: Astronomy Now <[email protected]>
79 moons is quite a lot. But it definitely takes away the romantic aura of this heavenl body.
The James Webb Telescope keeps getting postponed. Today the next postponement was announced. See https://www.universetoday.com/139620...nt-gas-giants/
So the Hubble Telescope remains the main space telescope we have.
The James Webb Space telescope will be concentrating on examining variations in planets that have some kind of atmosphere, to ascertain what its potential will be for its suitability to support life.
Saw a short on the James Webb Space telescope on NOVA last night. It has nearly 2 ounces of gold on its receiver as a coating 600 atoms thick ! Must be nightmare to calibrate.
Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY
"The James Webb Space Telescope is like the party of the century that keeps getting postponed. Due to its sheer complexity and some anomalous readings that were detected during vibration testing, the launch date of this telescope has been pushed back many times – it is currently expected to launch sometime in 2021."
I think it must be a money matter too. I somehow have the, maybe wrong idea, that NASA is doing less research this year.
Her is a bit more about the 12 Jupiter moons:
https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astr...-79-now-known/
Astronaut news!
NASA Will Announce Commercial Crew Astronaut Picks
"Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft will soon have their first riders: NASA plans to announce on Aug. 3 the astronauts assigned to the test flights and maiden voyages of the agency's commercial crew program.
NASA will air the event live from Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston starting at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT), where NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will introduce the astronauts. JSC Director Mark Geyer and Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana, as well as representatives from SpaceX and Boeing, will also be involved, NASA officials said in a statement. The program will reveal the astronauts assigned to each of the companies' crewed test flights and their first missions to the space station, which will all launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida."
https://www.space.com/41288-nasa-wil...stronauts.html
This is pretty exciting stuff. My hair stood up reading it. Especially the analogy with the lake under Antactica which houses several thousand species.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/undergrou...140133549.html
The dreaded double post again.
What's with all these double posts? They keep occurring because the4 message I get bacfk after trying to post suggests the post did not get through when it actually did get through and was posted.
Does anyone have a suggestion for this?
I think there is a time-delay working here.
So you just need patience...
I know it is not easy...
All you have to do is see if your post has been published in the "what is new session". And never mind if it is double.
That's a good tip: I always forget to check the "What's new session"
I ignore the recomendation to hang on for 30 seconds. If I see that the post is published I go on with my other activities.
How did it go?
Fine!
The red moon (just the images):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0YKH8r5gw
"Europa’s subsurface ocean offers the tantalizing possibility of alien life elsewhere in our solar system. Drilling through the thick ice crust on top of it for a sample would be difficult though. But now new research shows that a future lander might only have to “scratch the surface” to access any organic molecules deposited from the ocean below, in areas where there is less radiation exposure. Looking for life on Europa may actually be easier than we thought."
Well, there is Europa and Europa! :D
Life on the Moon? Maybe long ago
"Today, the Moon is about as inhospitable to life as it gets. The little water that’s there is trapped in ice or rock. It’s otherwise dry and airless, fluctuating in temperature by hundreds of degrees anywhere the sun shines. But long ago? That’s an entirely different story.
New research published in Astrobiology suggests that the Moon may have been shockingly habitable in the past during at least two periods — shortly after the Moon formed, and when volcanic activity was at its highest."
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/07/life-on-the-moon
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/0...M0MDg3Mzg4MAS2
It was to do with the voyager crafts who first discovered Pluto. Before that we knew nothing about another planet going around the sun.
"The Voyager program can only be called an unparalleled success; still, Pluto remained totally unexplored. Interest in a Pluto mission was high, and to fill this gap in our knowledge the so-called Pluto Fast Flyby mission was proposed in 1992. This mission, which was also known as Pluto Express and later Pluto Kuiper Express, was designed to incorporate two space probes that would be sent to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Sadly, this mission was ultimately cancelled in 2000 after almost a decade of planning. Two other similar proposals (Mariner Mark II and Pluto 350) were also cancelled along the way. This left Pluto completely unexplored years after Voyager 1 could have beamed back detailed images and information about what was at that time still considered the Sun’s ninth planet."
Pluto is decidedly low profile. I wonder how he will welcome visitors, once they start coming.
Glad to see you are back, DW!
Direct Evidence of Water Ice at the Moon’s Poles
"After more than a decade of tantalizing but inconclusive hints, new research shows convincingly that patches of water ice lie exposed on the floors of many permanently shadowed lunar craters.
The quest to find water on the Moon is a scientific pendulum that has swung widely over the centuries. Long ago we used "seas" to denote the Moon's dark, roughly circular areas, believing them to be reflections of Earth's oceans. The telescope changed that fanciful notion, and then our thinking was totally reset when the first Apollo samples proved bone dry and lacked any minerals consistent with a moist Moon. Another return swing occurred when reanalysis of Apollo samples found substantial amounts water trapped in tiny beads of volcanic glass."
https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astr...e-moons-poles/
Report calls for direct images of Earth-like exoplanets
By Paul Scott Anderson in SPACE | September 16, 2018
A congressionally-mandated report recommends that NASA lead efforts to directly image possibly Earth-like exoplanets, using upcoming technologies. A major goal is finding habitable – maybe even inhabited – worlds.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) in Washington, D.C., just released a new congressionally mandated report that aims to guide scientists’ study of exoplanets in the years to come. Among other things, the report urges NASA to lead a comprehensive direct imaging mission – using a new advanced space telescope – to study Earth-like exoplanets orbiting stars similar to our sun. The report is called Exoplanet Science Strategy.
The past several years have seen an explosion in the number of known exoplanets, or planets orbiting distant suns. At the moment, there are 3,779 confirmed planets, plus an additional 2,737 candidates awaiting verification. How many have been directly imaged? Fewer than two dozen, according to Wikipedia’s list of directly imaged exoplanets.
Many of the discovered exoplanets orbit close to their stars, and thus images are exceedingly difficult to image. Many are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, but others are smaller and rocky, like Earth. These rocky worlds would be the most difficult to image, but they’re of particular interest to astronomers and scientists, since at least some of them have the potential to be habitable and maybe even host life of some sort.
When scientists speak of Earth-like exoplanets, they’re basically referring to rocky planets of a similar size to Earth. With the limited information we currently have about these worlds, it’s still unknown how many of them have actual similarities to Earth, in terms of water, atmosphere, composition, habitability and so on. Obtaining that information is the next step in exoplanet research. From the report:
The past decade has delivered remarkable discoveries in the study of exoplanets. Hand-in-hand with these advances, a theoretical understanding of the myriad of processes that dictate the formation and evolution of planets has matured, spurred on by the avalanche of unexpected discoveries. Appreciation of the factors that make a planet hospitable to life has grown in sophistication, as has understanding of the context for biosignatures, the remotely detectable aspects of a planet’s atmosphere or surface that reveal the presence of life.
Glad to see you back, DW! Hope you are well.
Very interesting article. I found the link which also contains a video and illustrations:
http://earthsky.org/space/congressio...ike-exoplanets
"The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) in Washington, D.C., just released a new congressionally mandated report that aims to guide scientists’ study of exoplanets in the years to come."
http://earthsky.org/space/congressio...ike-exoplanets
As it is a national academy I suppose that the guide is intended for US scientists.
Thanks, Danik. I spent 2 weeks in Gävle Hospital and still feel rough! !Hopefully will improve slowly over the coming month..
I was re-reading through my Swedish posts to Populär Astronomi. Some of them are quite good, so I plan to publish them here, together with Wikipedia English translations.
I did not know that Sweden had its own space agency pages. You can find the English pages here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esrange. This is quite well-developed, so a read through will be helpful to orientating yourself.
Sweden is also developing its own Esrange organisations and infrastructure.
A lot is happening in astronomy. China is investigating the dark side of the moon, the side we never see because the Moon always faces the Earth. China has launched a probe to study this. The probe will travel across the Moonscape The Moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_1
New Horizons continues its exploration of the area beyond Pluto and is now far out in the vast Kuiper belt. See this update for more info-:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
The successor to the Hubble space telescope will be the James Webb telescope, postponed launch dates have resulted in several delays and the latest estimate for launch is now 2021. See https://www.space.com/43047-edwin-hu...expanding.html.
See also https://www.space.com/21925-james-we...cope-jwst.html
Israel have just yesterday launched a probe to the Moon, it landed on the dark side of the moon, much like China did with their probe, although the Chinese probe was deliberately aimed at the dark side of the moon and is exploring there, moving about.
Noticed just now that you have reactivated the thread.
That are fine news about the dark side of the moon.
I had to put in this video about the first collective image of a black hole. I hope some black hole fans are still around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpYcCI9uzKo
Sad to hear: not an auspicious landing... but a move forward in private investment exploration.
Thank you for the link Danik 2016... very informative.
Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY
Thanks, Tailor!
Just to remember, 50 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=hxPbnFc7iU8