Astronomy

October 10, 2022

NASA’s JunoCam Shares Stunning Rendering of Jupiter’s “Frosting-Like” Clouds

Jupiter is known for its swirling, stunning clouds. The marbled stripes and red spot make for a stunning view. These fascinating patterns exist in the planet's atmosphere, where cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water drift in an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. As beautiful as Jupiter is in photographs, it's even more stunning in a 3D rendering recently created by a citizen scientist using data from NASA's JunoCam.

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September 28, 2022

NASA Just Made History by Successfully Crashing a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hurtled into Earth. The impact of the enormous chunk of rock created a gigantic crater under what is now known as the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The asteroid sent debris flying, which clouded the skies around the globe. Tidal waves bombarded shorelines. The age of the dinosaurs came to a devastating end in a mass extinction event. Could this happen again?

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September 23, 2022

JWST Captures Square-Shaped Ripple Rings Around a Star, Perplexing Astronomers

“Nope, I don’t know what this is…” admitted citizen scientist Judy Schmidt when she shared a perplexing image on Twitter of a start with square-shaped ripple rings. Schmidt works with unprocessed scientific data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that has not been presented publicly to create incredible images. This glimpse of the star WR 140 is especially interesting. The Mid-Infrared (MIRI)

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August 31, 2022

Astronomers Discover an Ocean-Covered “Super-Earth” Exoplanet

Science-fiction writers have long dreamed of waterworlds—planets covered in endless ocean. Scientists, too, have postulated that these planets exist. Finding and verifying candidates, however, is elusive. The nearby exoplanet named TOI-1452 b may be the most promising of possibilities discovered. In The Astronomical Journal, scientists say its mass indicates that the surface of the exoplanet may be covered in a layer of liquid ocean.

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