Mysterious Ceres bright Spot-latest updates

This representation of Ceres' Occator Crater in false colors shows differences in the surface composition. Red corresponds to a wavelength range around 0.97 micrometers (near infrared), green to a wavelength range around 0.75 micrometers (red, visible light) and blue to a wavelength range of around 0.44 micrometers (blue, visible light). Occator measures about 60 miles (90 kilometers) wide.

Scientists use false color to examine differences in surface materials. The color blue on Ceres is generally associated with bright material, found in more than 130 locations, and seems to be consistent with salts, such as sulfates. It is likely that silicate materials are also present.

The images were obtained by the framing camera on NASA's Dawn spacecraft from a distance of about 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers).

Dawn's mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgments, seehttp://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission.

For more information about the Dawn mission, visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

About the Bright Spots

Ceres has more than 130 bright areas, and most of them are associated with impact craters. Study authors, led by Andreas Nathues at Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany, write that the bright material is consistent with a type of magnesium sulfate called hexahydrite. A different type of magnesium sulfate is familiar on Earth as Epsom salt.

Nathues and colleagues, using images from Dawn's framing camera, suggest that these salt-rich areas were left behind when water-ice sublimated in the past. Impacts from asteroids would have unearthed the mixture of ice and salt, they say.

"The global nature of Ceres' bright spots suggests that this world has a subsurface layer that contains briny water-ice," Nathues said.

Source: nasa , dawn spacecraft 

Solar and Heliospheric Observatory

   

After 20 years in space, ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, is still going strong. Originally launched in 1995 to study the sun and its influence out to the very edges of the solar system, SOHO revolutionized this field of science, known as heliophysics, providing the basis for nearly 5,000 scientific papers. SOHO discovered dynamic solar phenomena such as coronal waves, solar tsunamis and sun quakes, and found an unexpected role as the greatest comet hunter of all time—reaching 3,000 comet discoveries in September 2015.

    This "Best of SOHO" image by the observatory's LASCO C2 coronograph from Nov. 8, 2000, shows what appears to be two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) heading in symmetrically opposite directions from the sun. A 304Å image from SOHO's Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) taken on the same day has been superimposed over the dark disk which blocks the sun so that the LASCO instrument can observe the structures of the corona in visible light. CMEs, which are huge, fast-moving clouds of electrically-charged solar material that contain embedded magnetic fields, can cause geomagnetic storms when they collide with Earth’s magnetic field, causing it to shimmy and shake. The ability to connect the effects of geomagnetic storms—like auroras, GPS and communication disturbances, and geomagnetically induced currents, which can put a strain on power grids—to events on the sun has brought the idea of space weather into the mainstream.

Image Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO

New Horizons Returns First of the Best Images of Pluto

     The Mountainous Shoreline of Sputnik Planum: In this highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. "The mountains bordering Sputnik Planum are absolutely stunning at this resolution," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute. "The new details revealed here, particularly the crumpled ridges in the rubbly material surrounding several of the mountains, reinforce our earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations."

In this highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. Some mountain sides appear coated in dark material, while other sides are bright. Several sheer faces appear to show crustal layering, perhaps related to the layers seen in some ofPluto’s crater walls. Other materials appear crushed between the mountains, as if these great blocks of water ice, some standing as much as 1.5 miles high, were jostled back and forth. The mountains end abruptly at the shoreline of the informally named Sputnik Planum, where the soft, nitrogen-rich ices of the plain form a nearly level surface, broken only by the fine trace work of striking, cellular boundaries and the textured surface of the plain’s ices (which is possibly related to sunlight-driven ice sublimation). This view is about 50 miles wide. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Layered Craters and Icy Plains: This highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveals new details of Pluto’s rugged, icy cratered plains, including layering in the interior walls of many craters. "Impact craters are nature's drill rigs, and the new, highest-resolution pictures of the bigger craters seem to show that Pluto's icy crust, at least in places, is distinctly layered,” said William McKinnon, deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team, from Washington University in St. Louis. "Looking into Pluto’s depths is looking back into geologic time, which will help us piece together Pluto's geological history.”

Source: Nasa 

PLANET'S

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What is Neptune like?

Neptune is dark, cold, and very windy. It's the last of the planets in our solar system. It's more than 30 times as far from the sun as Earth is. Neptune is very similar to Uranus. It's made of a thick soup of water, ammonia, and methane over an Earth-sized solid center. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The methane gives Neptune the same blue color as Uranus. Neptune has six rings, but they're very hard to see.

What does Neptune look like?

Voyager 2 took this picture of Neptune in 1989.

Clouds streak across Neptune.

Neptune is a very cold, windy world.

What is Uranus like?

Uranus is made of water, methane, and ammonia fluids above a small rocky center. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium like Jupiter and Saturn, but it also has methane. The methane makes Uranus blue.

Uranus also has faint rings. The inner rings are narrow and dark. The outer rings are brightly colored and easier to see. Like Venus, Uranus rotates in the opposite direction as most other planets. And unlike any other planet, Uranus rotates on its side.

What does Uranus look like?

This picture shows Uranus surrounded by its four major rings and by 10 of its moons. This image has colors added to show the different altitudes and thicknesses of clouds in the atmosphere.

Green and blue areas show where the atmosphere is clear and sunlight can get through. The yellow and grey parts have thicker clouds. Orange and red colors mean very high clouds, similar to cirrus clouds on Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of Uranus. You can see bands and a dark spot in Uranus' atmosphere.

What is Saturn like?

Saturn isn’t the only planet to have rings, but it definitely has the most beautiful ones. The rings we see are made of groups of tiny ringlets that surround Saturn. They’re made of chunks of ice and rock. Like Jupiter, Saturn is mostly a ball of hydrogen and helium.

When Galileo Galilei saw Saturn through a telescope in the 1600s, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. At first he thought he was looking at three planets, or a planet with handles. Now we know those "handles" turned out to be the rings of Saturn.

a merit badge with a purple ring in the centera merit badge has bands of yellow and blue showing a general gas gianta merit badge with a planet and an arrow encircling it, showing rotationa merit badge with a sun and an arrow encircling it, showing revolution around the suna merit badge with an orange planet and a thick blue band above ita merit badge with an ancient symbola merit badge that shows an orange planet horizon and a moon in the backgrounda merit badge with a simplified spacecraft made of a square and two rectangles

What does Saturn look like?

A close up view of Saturn's rings. They are grey and tan, and there are spaces in between where you can see the black color of space through them.

The Cassini spacecraft took this picture of Saturn's rings. You can see the grey and tan colors.

A photo of Saturn with its rings at an angle pointing upwards. Next to Saturn are two white dots, which are moons.

This is a picture of Saturn and its moons Tethys and Dione. Voyager 1 took this picture as it passed by.

A photo of Saturn where it is backlit by the sun. Saturn and its rings are nearly black, and the sun is making the edges glow.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft went behind Saturn and took this picture in 2013. You can see seven of its moons and its inner rings. In the background you can also see Earth.

A photo of Saturn looking down on it, showing its rings clearly. The shadow of Saturn falls on the left side of the rings.

A portrait looking down on Saturn and its rings. This picture was made from images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2013. It was put together by amateur image processor and Cassini fan Gordan Ugarkovic.

What is Jupiter like?

Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. It's similar to a star, but it never got big enough to start burning. It is covered in swirling cloud stripes. It has big storms like the Great Red Spot, which has been going for hundreds of years. Jupiter is a gas giant and doesn't have a solid surface, but it may have a solid inner core about the size of Earth. Jupiter also has rings, but they're too faint to see very well.

What does Jupiter look like?

Here you can see Jupiter and one of its many moons, Ganymede.

This picture is actually four pictures taken by Cassini put together. The dark spot on the left is the shadow from Jupiter's moon Europa.

This picture taken by Voyager 2 shows the Great Red Spot.


Source: Nasa

For more information visit solarsystem.nasa.gov.

The GIANT MAGELLAN Telescope -- Resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope

            The Giant Magellan Telescope will be one member of the next class of super giant earth-based telescopes that promises to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe. It will be constructed in the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Commissioning of the telescope is scheduled to begin in 2021.

           The GMT has a unique design that offers several advantages. It is a segmented mirror telescope that employs seven of today’s largest stiff monolith mirrors as segments. Six off-axis 8.4 meter or 27-foot segments surround a central on-axis segment, forming a single optical surface 24.5 meters, or 80 feet, in diameter with a total collecting area of 368 square meters. The GMT will have a resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. The GMT project is the work of a distinguished international consortium of leading universities and science institutions.

Quick info:

• Completion target – 2021
• Location – Las Campanas Observatory, Chile
• Altitude of site – 8,254 feet (2,516 meters)
• Height of telescope housing – 200 feet (61 meters)
• Moving weight of telescope – 2,425,085 pounds (1,100 tons)
• Weight of each finished mirror segment – 25,000 pounds (12.5 tons)
• Diameter of each mirror – 28 feet (8.4 meters)
• Effective diameter of all mirrors – 83.5 feet (24.5 meters)
• Total collecting area of mirrors – 3,961 sq. feet (368 sq. meters)
• Mounting type – altitude/azimuth
• Wavelength sensitivity of telescope – Near infrared and visible (320–25000 nanometers)

For photo courtesy and more info visit following link

For more click here (official site)

IMAGES OF JUPITER BY VOYAGER SPACECRAFT

       Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April, after taking almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.

Credits: Nasa, jpl, Esa

DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY

DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY 

 When scientists study our universe, they see that it’s expanding. But if the universe is only made of the galaxies, stars, planets, and other things that we know about, it shouldn’t be expanding. Something else is out there. There has to be energy that is making the universe expand. We just don’t know what this energy is. We also don’t know where it comes from. But we can tell that it’s there. Scientists named this energy dark energy

This image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter.

This might be a surprise, but we don’t know what most of the universe is made of. Seriously, we don’t. You might be thinking, “But of course we do! It’s made of galaxies, stars, planets, black holes, comets, asteroids, and all the other cool space stuff!”

    Yes, there is a lot of amazing space stuff, but if we add it all up, it’s just a very small part of the entire universe. There’s a lot more out there. And we don’t fully understand what it is.

    We don’t know much about dark energy, but we do know there is a lot of it. Dark energy makes up 68%, about two-thirds, of the universe.

     There is also stuff out there in space that has gravity. We can see its pull on matter like stars and galaxies. But it’s not regular matter. It’s not a black hole. It’s not anything that we have ever heard of. But it’s definitely there. Scientists named this stuff dark matter.

Just like dark energy, we don’t know a whole lot about dark matter. But it seems that 27% of the universe, or about one quarter, is made up of the strange stuff.

      Together, dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of the universe. That’s almost all of it! That only leaves a small 5% for all the matter and energy we know and understand. Energy like light, heat, and X-rays, together with matter like people, elephants, planet Earth, the sun, and all the galaxies only makes up 5% of the universe! That’s not very much.

                   

Dark matter and dark energy raise some of the biggest questions in the study of space and physics. Lots of scientists are using observations and math to figure out what these are. This will help us understand more about our amazing universe, where there is always more to discover and more to learn.

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.

NASA/STSci/Ann Feild

                

Credits:nasa, esa 

What is Auroras?

What is Auroras?

If you’re ever near the North or South Pole, you may be in for a very special treat. Frequently there are beautiful light shows in the sky. These lights are called auroras. If you’re near the North Pole, it is called an aurora borealis or northern lights. If you’re near the South Pole, it is called an aurora australis or the southern lights. 

This beautiful view of the aurora was taken from the International Space Station as it crossed over the southern Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011.

What makes this happen?

Even though auroras are best seen at night, they are actually caused by the sun.

                           

The sun sends us more than heat and light; it sends lots of otherenergy and small particles our way. The protective magnetic fieldaround Earth shields us from most of the energy and particles, and we don’t even notice them.

But the sun doesn’t send the same amount of energy all the time. There is a constant streaming solar wind and there are also solar storms. During one kind of solar storm called a coronal mass ejection, the sun burps out a huge bubble of electrified gas that can travel through space at high speeds.

When a solar storm comes toward us, some of the energy and small particles can travel down the magnetic field lines at the north and south poles into Earth’s atmosphere.

                           

There, the particles interact with gases in our atmosphere resulting in beautiful displays of light in the sky. Oxygen gives off green and red light. Nitrogen glows blue and purple

The green bands of light in the sky are an aurora australis, an aurora at the south pole. Credit: Keith Vanderlinde, National Science Foundation

Do other planets get auroras?

These swirls of red light are an aurora on the south pole of Saturn. Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/STScI/A. Schaller.

They sure do! Auroras are not just something that happen on Earth. If a planet has an atmosphere and magnetic field, they probably have auroras. We’ve seen amazing auroras on Jupiter and Saturn.

                        

                     The NASA Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of a bright blue aurora on Jupiter.

credits: NASA

Why the Planets are Round?

Why the planets are round?

Scaled image of planets and sun relative to each other

Big, small, but all round

The eight planets in our solar system differ in lots of ways. They are different sizes. They are different distances from the sun. Some are small and rocky, and others are big and gassy. But they're all nice and round. Why is that? Why aren't they shaped like cubes, pyramids, or discs?

Planets form when material in space starts to bump and clump together. After a while it has enough stuff to have a good amount of gravity. That's the force that holds stuff together in space. When a forming planet is big enough, it starts to clear its path around the star it orbits. It uses its gravity to snag bits of space stuff.

A planet's gravity pulls equally from all sides. Gravity pulls from the center to the edges like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. This makes the overall shape of a planet a sphere, which is a three-dimensional circle.

Are they all perfect, though?

While all the planets in our solar system are nice and round, some are rounder than others. Mercury and Venus are the roundest of all. They are nearly perfect spheres, like marbles.

But some planets aren't quite so perfectly round.

Saturn and Jupiter are bit thicker in the middle. As they spin around, they bulge out along the equator. Why does that happen? When something spins, like a planet as it rotates, things on the outer edge have to move faster than things on the inside to keep up. This is true for anything that spins, like a wheel, a DVD, or a fan. Things along the edge have to travel the farthest and fastest.

Courtesy. NASA.