Whether you're feeling optimistic or pessimistic about humanity's long-term chances on Earth, most of us agree that we should colonize other planets. Whether that's out of humanity's sheer pioneering spirit or the pragmatic survival instinct to spread out so that a catastrophe on Earth doesn't wipe out the species, establishing a colony on a nearby planet seems like a must.
Trouble is, our neighboring celestial bodies are constantly bombarded by deadly radiation, lack water or oxygen, rain sulfuric acid, swing from extreme heat to cold, and possess many other inhospitable characteristics. No matter where we go in our solar system, we'll have to engage in one of the largest projects imaginable: terraforming. Depending on the environment we want to transform into a more Earth-like one, the nature of this project will vary tremendously.
And here's another article:
Western-led team investigates interstellar bodies originating from beyond our solar system
Astonishingly, not one but two interstellar asteroids have been detected entering our solar system since 2017.
The first was given the Hawaiian name 'Oumuamua, meaning 'messenger from afar,' after its discovery by Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk. The second, 2I/Borisov, was named for its discoverer Gennadiy Borisov.
Paul Wiegert from Western University's Institute for Earth & Space Exploration is now tracing the origins of these far-travelling bodies with his former undergraduate student Tim Hallatt, the lead author on the paper, now a graduate student at McGill University.
How Hot is the Sun? | Interesting Facts About the Sun
4.5 billion years ago, in the Orion Spur of the Milky Way galaxy, a swirling cloud of gas and dust collapsed under the weight of its own gravity. This so-called solar nebula spun faster and faster, and—as it eventually flattened out—most of that material drew toward the center, giving birth to our home star, the sun.
At its equator, the sun rotates approximately every 27 days. But at its poles, it rotates roughly every 36 days. Sounds strange, right? Well, the sun isn’t made of solid matter like Earth is, so that means that different parts of the star rotate at different times.
Asteroid Hygiea May Be the Smallest Dwarf Planet in the Solar System | Space
The asteroid Hygiea may qualify as a dwarf planet — and it could steal the title of the smallest dwarf planet in the solar system!
Astronomers have captured high-resolution imagery of Hygiea, the fourth largest rock in the Asteroid Belt . And low and behold, Hygiea is spherical in shape. That's a pretty important dwarf-planet marker, and the only one Hygiea was missing until now.
Asteroids boast a variety of shapes, but the rounded shape of dwarf planets shows that they had enough mass for its own gravity to pull it into this round shape. Hygiea already met the other requirements for dwarf-planet classification since it orbits the sun, is not a moon orbiting another planet and has not cleared other objects out of its own orbit.
Quite a lot has been going on:
NASA Confirms Voyager 2 Has Left the Solar System - ExtremeTech
Humanity first left the solar system in 2012 when the Voyager 1 probe passed into interstellar space decades after leaving the planets behind. Now, there’s a second spacecraft beyond the limits of our solar system : Voyager 2. Luckily, Voyager 2’s instruments are in somewhat better shape than Voyager 1’s, so scientists were able to observe the transition from the heliosphere, which is dominated by the sun, to the interstellar medium (ISM).
Both Voyager probes launched in 1977, with Voyager 2 heading into space a few weeks before Voyager 1. The two probes are physically identical, but they took different paths through the solar system. They took advantage of the “Grand Tour,” an alignment of the planets that occurs only once every 175 years. Voyager 1 visited and got gravity assists from Jupiter and Saturn before heading off toward the edge of the solar system. Voyager 2 swung past Jupter, Saturn, Neptune, and
A Rocky Planet in This Oddball Solar System Would Have Stunning Skies - D-brief
Some have giant planets that swing through the planetary systems in stretched-out, or "eccentric," elliptical orbits, unlike the nearly circular orbits of planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
Astronomers think that many of these eccentric giant planets would act like "wrecking balls" in their planetary systems, disturbing the orbits of other, smaller planets. But that's not always the case, according to a study published last week in The Astronomical Journal .
Fast Times in the Early Solar System | Planetary News
Calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, CAIs, are light-colored masses in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites — they are the first formed solids in the solar system. Being so old, they provide a unique view into processes early in our solar system, including when and how its dust coagulated to form larger objects (like CAIs) and eventually planets. A team of scientists, led by M. C.
U-I designed Voyager 2 leaves the solar system - Radio Iowa
A spacecraft carrying instruments designed and built at the University of Iowa is now the second man-made object to leave our solar system and it’s heading off into interstellar space.
Don Gurnett, a U-I professor emeritus, helped craft the plasma wave instrument onboard Voyager 2, which has passed the outer boundary of the sun's influence, what’s known as the heliosphere.
That’s a long, long way away. “Think of the speed of light, that’s the speed at which a radio wave propagates, and it takes 19 hours now for the radio signal to get from Voyager 1 back to the Earth,” Gurnett says. “It’s just out there at a staggeringly large distance.”
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