#and there's a song for Cassini which leads directly into Saturn

[dangerous-disposition]

thinking about Cassini, my dad, and grief tonight. probably gonna listen to Sleeping At Last then go to bed.

[nightowlgazette]

Wave At The Stars and They will Wave Back

“Saturn is my absolute favorite object in the night sky. When I was a child, I had a dog-eared book on the Solar System, which I read over and over, stopping and staring with wonder at the section on Saturn. How could a planet have rings of ice? What would it be like to fly out and visit the planet, to see the rings with your own eyes. How did it get all those strange moons?”

~Maria

Maria has always been fascinated by the night sky and what lays beyond it. As a matter of fact, she met the love of her life, Maxine, while watching Saturn from the Girffith Observatory.

Their eyes locked, time stopped...then Maria tripped and accidentally spilled her iced coffee all over Max in the middle of winter and the rest is history.

So, for this very special article as a second early wedding gift to her and Max, we asked all of you which are your fevourite celestial bodies, and compiled a small list of interesting facts about them!

Saturn

As Maria’s favourite planet, and the reason Max and her met, Saturn has the honour of being at the very top of the list.

Did you know:

Saturn has 82 moons As of the pennings of this article, Saturn boasts Solar System's most known moons: 82! Some of these are large, like Titan, the second largest moon in the Solar System. But most are tiny – just a few km across, and they have no official names. 

There could be life near Saturn Not life on Saturn; the planet is way too hostile to support life. But there could be life on one of Saturn’s moons: Enceladus. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered ice geysers blasting out of Enceladus’ southern pole. This means that some process is keep the moon warm enough that water can remain a liquid underneath the surface. And wherever we find liquid water on Earth, we find life

Jupiter

For number two, we have Jupiter, named after the King of the Olympians himself.

Did you know:

Jupiter has 79 moons Second only to Saturn, Jupiter has a 79 confirmed and named satellites. However, it is estimated that the planet has over 200 natural satellites orbiting it. Almost all of them are less than 10 kilometers in diameter, and were only discovered after 1975, when the first spacecraft (Pioneer 10) arrived at Jupiter. However, it also has four major moons, which are collectively known as the Galilean Moons. These are, in order of distance from Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. These moons are some of the largest in the Solar System, with Ganymede being the largest, measuring 5262 km in diameter.

You Can See Jupiter With Your Own Eyes Jupiter is the third brightest object in the Solar System, after Venus and the Moon. Chances are, you saw Jupiter in the sky, and had no idea that’s what you were seeing. And here at Universe Today, we are in the habit of letting readers know when the best opportunities for spotting Jupiter in the night sky are. Just think, you’ll be seeing precisely what Galileo did when he gazed at the planet in 1610!

Mars

For the last planet on our list -but definitely not the least- we have Mars; the Red Planet.

Did you know:

Mars Had Water In The Ancient Past We’ve been debating for centuries about whether Mars had life or not. In fact, the astronomer Percival Lowell misinterpreted observations of “canali” — the Italian word for channels — on the planet as evidence of alien-made canals. It turned out Lowell’s observations were hampered by poor telescope optics of his day, and the canals he saw were optical illusions. That said, several spacecraft have spotted other signs of ancient water — channels grooved in the terrain and rocks that only could have formed in the presence of water, for example.

Mars Has Two Moons – And One Of Them Is Doomed: The planet has two asteroid-like moons called Phobos and Deimos, named after the sons of Ares -or the Roman Mars- in Greek mythology.  Because they have compositions that are similar to asteroids found elsewhere in the Solar System, according to NASA, most scientists believe the Red Planet’s gravity snatched the moons long ago and forced them into orbit. But in the life of the Solar System, Phobos has a pretty short lifetime. In about 30 million to 50 million years, Phobos is going to crash into Mars’ surface or rip apart because the tidal force of the planet will prove too much to resist.

Black Holes

Moving on from planets to the other beauties of space, for number four we have Black Holes.

Did you know:

You Can’t Directly See a Black Hole. A black hole is called a black hole because of it’s color, especially since light can’t escape. What we can see, though, is the effects of a black hole. Analyzing the surrounding area of a black hole, we can see its effects upon its environment. For example, a star that’s close enough to a black hole can be seen being ripped apart.

Dying Stars Lead to Stellar Black Holes. The death of large stars lead to black holes, because a star’s gravity will overwhelm the star’s natural pressure that it maintains to keep its shape. When the pressure from the nuclear reactions collapses, gravity overwhelms and collapses the star’s core, and the star’s other layers are thrown off into space, and this process is also known as a supernova. The remainder of the core collapses, a spot overcome by density and without volume – a black hole.

There are Three Categories of Black Holes. 1) Primordial Black holes – These are the smallest of black holes and range from an atom’s size to a mountain’s mass.

2) Stellar Black Holes – These are the most common of black holes and they can be up to 20 times more massive than the Sun. There are also a variety of these all over the Milky Way.

3) Supermassive Black Holes – These are the largest of black holes, being more than 1 million times more massive than the Sun. There’s also a song named Supermassive Black Hole by Muse.

Perseid Meteors

Did you know:

We’ve had a near-miss in the past, and there may be one again in the future. Back in the early 1990s, astronomer Brian Marsden calculated that Swift-Tuttle might actually hit Earth on a future pass. More observations quickly eliminated all possibility of a collision. Marsden found, however, that the comet and Earth might experience a cosmic near miss (about a million miles) in 3044.

The meteors are what shooting stars are made of. When a Perseid particle enters the atmosphere, it compresses the air in front of it, which heats up. The meteor, in turn, can be heated to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 Celsius). The intense heat vaporizes most meteors, creating what we call shooting stars. Most become visible at around 60 miles up (97 kilometers). Some large meteors splatter, causing a brighter flash called a fireball, and sometimes an explosion that can often be heard from the ground.

Next Time Around. Swift-Tuttle is due back in 2126 (as you know now, it won't hit us) and astronomers think it might become a spectacular naked-eye comet like Hale-Bopp. If historical calculations are correct (see Fact #9) then the 2126 appearance will mark the comet's 3rd millennium of human observation, assuming someone is in fact around to see it.

Pulsars

Did you know:

Pulsars are what remains after the death of a massive star. Pulsars are types of neutron stars; the dead relics of massive stars. What sets pulsars apart from regular neutron stars is that they’re highly magnetized, and rotating at enormous speeds. Astronomers detect them by the radio pulses they emit at regular intervals.

Pulsars are invaluable when it comes to discovering more about space. Pulsars help us search for gravitational waves, probe the interstellar medium, and even find extrasolar planets in orbit. In fact, the first extrasolar planets were discovered around a pulsar in 1992, when astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of a multi-planet planetary system around PSR B1257+12 – a millisecond pulsar now known to have two extrasolar planets. 

It has even been proposed that spacecraft could use them as beacons to help navigate around the Solar System. On NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, there are maps that show the direction of the Sun to 14 pulsars in our region. If aliens wanted to find our home planet, they couldn’t ask for a more accurate map.

Eliot Wilde, journalist and writer for Night Owl and host of Night Owl FM