Observations from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.
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An image combining orbital imagery with 3-D modeling shows flows that appear in spring and summer on a slope inside Mars’ Newton crater. Sequences of observations recording the seasonal changes at this site and a few others with similar flows might be evidence …
The prevailing theory on lunar formation is the giant impact theory which suggests the moon formed when a Mars-sized body slammed into the infant Earth. This threw a cloud of vaporized and molten rock into orbit, which coalesced into the moon.
Simulations have previously shown that additional moons could have formed from the debris cloud, sharing an orbit with the … Read the rest of this article
For the third day in a row, sunspot 1261 has unleashed a significant M-class solar flare. The latest blast at 0357 UT on August 4th registered M9.3 on the Richter Scale of Flares, almost crossing the threshold into X-territory (X-flares are the most powerful kind).
Earth’s magnetic field is likely to receive a double-strike from the clouds of gas on … Read the rest of this article
On August 2nd, the sun hurled a cloud of plasma (Coronal Mass Ejection – CME) toward Earth when magnetic fields above sunspot 1261 erupted. Analysts expect the CME to arrive during the early hours of August 5th, possibly sparking geomagnetic storms around the poles.
This is not a big event; the eruption that propelled the cloud in our direction registered … Read the rest of this article
The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.
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The galaxy NGC 3115 is shown here in a …
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has shown that water expelled from the moon Enceladus forms a giant torus of water vapour around Saturn. The discovery solves a 14-year mystery by identifying the source of the water in Saturn’s upper atmosphere.
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At least four distinct plumes of water ice spew out from the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Light reflected …
After more than a week of quiescence, solar activity is picking up with the emergence of two large sunspot groups on the sun’s northeastern limb.
The active regions are crackling with C- and M-class solar flares. So far none of the eruptions has been squarely Earth directed, but that could change in the days ahead as solar rotation turns the … Read the rest of this article
Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.
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This artist’s concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole, similar to APM …
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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Aurora Oval
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