Jupiter’s icy moons are the focus of Europe’s next large science mission, ESA announced today. The Jupiter Icy moons Explorer – JUICE – was selected over two other candidates: NGO, the New Gravitational wave Observatory, to hunt for gravitational waves, and ATHENA, the Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. Credits: ESA/AOES
New movies of Jupiter are the first to catch an invisible wave shaking up one of the giant planet’s jet streams, an interaction that also takes place in Earth’s atmosphere and influences the weather. The movies, made from images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft when it flew by Jupiter in 2000, are part of an…
Earlier this month, ESA’s Mars Express performed a special manoeuvre to observe an unusual alignment of Jupiter and the martian moon Phobos. The impressive images have now been processed into a movie of this rare event. At the moment when Mars Express, Phobos, and Jupiter aligned on 1 June 2011, there was a distance of 11 389…
Detailed observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found an answer to the flash of light seen June 3 on Jupiter. It came from a giant meteor burning up high above Jupiter’s cloud tops. The space visitor did not plunge deep enough into the atmosphere to explode and leave behind any telltale cloud of…
So you thought Northern Lights were big in Alaska? “That’s nothing,” says Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “Jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet.” Last month, Gladstone and colleagues used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture this picture: X-ray auroras observed by the Chandra X-ray Observatory overlaid on…
Four hundred years ago when Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, the satellites appeared in his primitive telescope as tiny, almost infinitesimal specks of light pirouetting around the giant planet. Their discovery transformed 17th century cosmology and made Galileo famous, but he never saw them as anything more than star-like pinpricks. The “Galilean satellites” were…
Amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley from Canberra, Australia captured an image of Jupiter on July 19, 2009 showing a possible new impact site. Anthony’s image shows a new dark spot in the South Polar Region of Jupiter, at approximately 216° longitude in System 2. It looks very similar to the impact marks made on Jupiter when…
Today NASA released stunning new images of Jupiter and its moons taken by the New Horizons spacecraft. Views include a movie of a volcanic eruption on Jupiter’s moon Io; a nighttime shot of auroras and lava on Io; a color photo of the “Little Red Spot” churning in Jupiter’s cloudtops; images of small moons herding…
The Sun Now (Visible light) |
The Sun Now (H-Alpha light) |
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Aurora Oval (Northern Hemisphere) |
Aurora Oval (Southern Hemisphere) |
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