Astronomy

Thanks, Danik. I can't find any reference to diamonds in earth sky.org, but I still feel I had read something about this in a post somewhere.

DW
I found several references to the "diamond rain", though I didn´t look specifically in earth.sky. org. Most of the links I found are from former years, so you must have read about it indeed.

Here is a recent link about scientists recreating the diamond rain in a lab:

https://phys.org/news/2017-08-scient...icy-giant.html

Thanks for the link, Danik. This is pretty good. The article talks about diamond rain as being far inside the icy planets and their moons, so its about right I would say.

Again it seems that the physical concepts we learned at school, don´t work for other celestial bodies.

"A new hot Neptune may be a massive water world
HAT-P-26b is a steamy, steamy world."

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/0...may-host-water

That's right. There is clearly a huge diversity of planets, they can't be classified by what we have in the solar system.

Watch Asteroid "Florence" as it glides past Earth: https://www.universetoday.com/136981...earth-weekend/. It is pretty big, about 4.4 kilometres across. No danger of it crashing on earth, though.

Florence looks quite impressive. I hope it behaves well.

I'm pretty sure it will, its a long way from Earth and these days close attention is paid to all sizeable space rocks caught in orbit of the sun.

The Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA is an organisation that follows this: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news198.html

It is not clear how this sub-unit of NASA works. It may only have a couple of people keeping it going, with more drawn in if there should be an emergency. And does it consults with a Russian equivelent? Just a few years ago there was a meteor that grazed low over a Russian town. See the Chelybinsk Meteor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor. In 1908 a large area of Russian forest was flattened: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event. This would be a good area for US/Russian collaboration.

Neither do I, DW. I only imagine that keeping this units must cost a lot of money.
I also have no idea about how the colaboration of astronomers US/Russia is today.

Just found this:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...enus-together/

So there is some colaboration.

That was in interesting link, Danik. The USSR sent several probes to Venus before the USSR collapsed. So its a good thing to see the research continued in collaboration between Russia and the USA.

Specially considering the current international political positions of both countries, I think.

Absolutely!

https://www.universetoday.com/137023...hout-universe/