#Planetary and Space Science

[theofficialastronomy101]

(NEW UPDATE WITH PHOTOS) Send us your best photos!

Absolutely beautiful! I hope everyone took this in! Makes you think just how small we are. A moment the world comes together as one! That’s true humanity . We will be uploading more amazing photos to this same post. So come back later on and check out our 2024 once in a lifetime eclipse photos.

[amnhnyc]

When the Hayden Planetarium opened in October 1935, it was only the fourth planetarium in the United States. Nearly a century later, the Museum is still bringing audiences the latest science about our cosmos. Visit the Hayden Planetarium and the Rose Center for Earth and Space to learn about the 13-billion-year history of the universe!

[mindblowingscience]

NASA has launched the Europa Clipper spacecraft on an almost 10-year mission to learn whether conditions on Jupiter’s moon could sustain life in what scientists believe could be a deep ocean hidden beneath its icy surface. The spacecraft, which is supposed to travel 3 billion kilometres (1.8 billion miles), was launched on Monday on board SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket from a NASA facility on Florida’s east coast.

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[belovedapollo]

child of the universe, lost in space and time, only a fragment of light, made of stardust ⭐️ reblog is ok, don’t repost/use

[moodymishhty]

Space/Astronomy Mood board

[thefallencomet]

It is with great pleasure, that I tell y’all tonight:

SATURN HAS REACHED AND SURPASSED A TOTAL OF 100 KNOWN MOONS

(102 as of this post, likely still many more to come! 19 confirmed by the Minor Planet Center in the last week!)

Edit: Lot of folks still interacting with this post!

The complete set of Saturnian Moons was released, the saga has ended (for now), 62 newly confirmed moons for a grand total of 145 moons, doubling the population of known irregular satellites (small asteroid moons on distant chaotic orbits) around Saturn!

[thepastisalreadywritten]

With the addition of Saturn, the James Webb Space Telescope has finally captured all four of our Solar System's giant worlds.

JWST's observations of the ringed planet, taken on 25 June 2023, have been cleaned up and processed, giving us a spectacular view of Saturn's glorious rings, shining golden in the darkness.

By contrast, the disk of Saturn is quite dark in the new image, lacking its characteristic bands of cloud, appearing a relatively featureless dim brown.

This is because of the wavelengths in which JWST sees the Universe – near- and mid-infrared.

These wavelengths of light are usually invisible to the naked human eye, but they can reveal a lot.

For example, thermal emission – associated with heat – is dominated by infrared wavelengths.

When you're trying to learn about what's going on inside a planet wrapped in thick, opaque clouds, studying its temperature is a valuable way to go about it.

Some elements and chemical processes emit infrared light, too. Seeing the planets of the Solar System in wavelengths outside the narrow range admitted by our vision can tell us a lot more about what they have going on.

Saturn

As we saw last week, when we clapped eyes on the raw JWST Saturn images, the observations involved filters that dimmed the light of the planet, while allowing light from the rings and moons to shine brightly.

This is so a team led by planetary scientist Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in the UK can study the rings and moons of Saturn in more detail.

They hope to identify new ring structures and, potentially, even new moons orbiting the gas giant.

The image above shows three of Saturn's moons, Dione, Enceladus and Tethys, to the left of the planet.

Although dim, the disk of the planet also reveals information about Saturn's seasonal changes.

The northern hemisphere is reaching the end of its 7-year summer, but the polar region is dark. An unknown aerosol process could be responsible.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere around the edges of the disk appears bright, which could be the result of methane fluorescence, or the glow of trihydrogen, or both. Further analysis could tell us which.

Jupiter

Jupiter was the first of the giant planets to get the JWST treatment, with images dropping in August of last year – and boy howdy were they stunning.

The spectacular detail seen in the planet's turbulent clouds and storms was perhaps not entirely surprising.

However, we also got treated to some rarely seen features: the permanent aurorae that shimmer at Jupiter's poles, invisible in optical wavelengths, and Jupiter's tenuous rings.

We also saw two of the planet's smaller, lesser-known moons, Amalthea and Adrastea, with fuzzy blobs of distant galaxies in the background.

"This one image sums up the science of our Jupiter system program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings, and its satellite system," said astronomer Thierry Fouchet of Paris Observatory in France, who co-led the observations.

Neptune

Observations of Neptune arrived in the latter half of September 2022.

Because Neptune is so very far away, it tends to get a little neglected; you're probably used to seeing, if anything, the images taken by Voyager 2 when it flew past in 1989.

JWST's observations gave us, for the first time in more than 30 years, a new look at the ice giant's dainty rings – and the first ever in infrared.

It also revealed seven of Neptune's 14 known moons, and bright spots in its atmosphere.

Most of those are storm activity, but if you look closely, you'll see a bright band circling the planet's equator.

This had never been seen before and could be, scientists say, a signature of Neptune's global atmospheric circulation.

Uranus

Uranus is also pretty far away, but it's also a huge weirdo. Although very similar to Neptune, the two planets are slightly different hues, which is something of a mystery.

Uranus is also tipped sideways, which is challenging to explain too.

JWST's observations, released in April 2023, aren't solving these conundrums.

However, they have revealed 11 of the 13 structures of the incredible Uranian ring system and an unexplained atmospheric brightening over the planet's polar cap.

JWST has a lot to say about the early Universe; but it's opening up space science close to home, too.

As its first year of operations comes to an end, we can't help but speculate what new wonders will be to come in the years ahead.

Top: Jupiter - Neptune / Bottom: Uranus - Saturn

Credit: NASA

[big-low-t]

Bob Eggleton

[typhlonectes]

Dwarf planet Eris is ‘squishier’ than expected

University of California, Santa Cruz Professor of Planetary Sciences Francis Nimmo recently co-authored a Science Advances paper about the internal structure of the dwarf planet Eris. Eris is about the size of Pluto but around 50% farther from the sun. The discovery of Eris in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune in 2005 prompted the debate that ultimately reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. It was an interest in Pluto that drew UC Santa Cruz researcher Francis Nimmo to study Eris. Nimmo was visiting Michael Brown—one of the discoverers of Eris—at the California Institute of Technology about six months ago and realized some of Brown’s new, unpublished data could help reveal information about the properties of Eris. The two worked on models for the next several months and published their results in a Science Advances paper. Two main pieces of information led to their results. The first important clue is that Eris and its moon, Dysnomia, always face the same way toward each other. The main, unexpected result of Nimmo and Brown’s model is that Eris is surprisingly dissipative, or “squishy”...

Read more: https://charmingscience.com/dwarf-planet-eris-is-squishier-than-expected/

[celestialdaily]

The celestial object of the day is TOI-1338b, unofficially known as Wolftopia!

This planet orbits around two stars, causing irregularities in its orbit, making it vary between 95 and 93 days. Although its orbit will keep being stable for another ten million years, its angle towards us will change, meaning that we can't see another transit until 2031.

[theofficialastronomy101]

It took 10 years for the Italian astrophotographer Marcella Julia Pace to capture these 48 colors of the Moon.

[thefirststarr]

To some it looks like a cat's eye. To others, like a giant cosmic conch shell. This is actually one of the brightest and most highly detailed planetary nebula known- the Cats Eye Nebula. It is composed of gas expelled in the brief yet glorious phase near the end of life of a Sun-like star. This nebula's dying central star may have produced the outer circular concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. The formation of the beautiful inner structures, however, is not well understood. The featured image is a composite of a digitally sharpened Hubble Space Telescope image with X-ray light captured by the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The exquisite nebula spans over half a light-year across. Of course, by gazing into this Cat's Eye, humanity may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about 5 billion years.

Image Credit & Copyright: NASA Hubble, Chandra

Processing Copyright: Rudy Pohl

[mindblowingscience]

A planet relatively close to Earth could be the first ever detected with a potentially life-sustaining liquid ocean outside our Solar System, according to scientists using the James Webb space telescope. More than 5,000 planets have been discovered outside of the Solar System so far, but only a handful are in what is called the "Goldilocks zone" -- neither too hot or too cold -- that could host liquid water, a key ingredient for life. The exoplanet LHS 1140 b is one of the few in this habitable zone, and has been thoroughly scrutinized since it was first discovered in 2017.

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[hewaje]

Black Dwarf

[per-asperaa-ad-astra]

This is the southern ring nebula (NGC 3132) and if you're wondering what does it look like now, you just have to wait only 2500 years to get the answer.