On November 11 we're in for a rare treat, as the innermost planet, Mercury, passes directly in front of the Sun for a few hours.
This event is called a transit, and for Mercury they happen only about 13 times in a century. (Transits of Venus are even more rare.)
The event will last about five and a half hours, during which Mercury's path will take it right across the middle of the Sun's disk. For observers in the Eastern U.S., the transit begins after sunrise, meaning you'll be able to view the entire thing. For the central and western U.S., the transit begins before sunrise, but there's enough time left as the Sun climbs up the sky for you to catch a glimpse before Mercury makes its exit.
Now remember, you should never look directly at the Sun without proper protection, as it can permanently damage your eyes. If you have a pair eclipse shades, those are okay for viewing the Sun, but Mercury is so small in comparison that it can be next to impossible to see a transit without magnification.
In case you are keeping track:
Second interstellar visitor may be carrying water from beyond our solar system, shocking study
A shocking new study suggests that the second interstellar object ever discovered, Comet 2I/Borisov, could be carrying water on it from beyond the Solar System.
The study suggests that 2I/Borisov, discovered on Aug. 30 by astronomer Gennady Borisov, is releasing water vapor on its journey.
"Using a simple sublimation model we estimate an H2O active area of 1.7 km2 [0.65 miles squared], which for current estimates for the size of Borisov suggests active fractions between 1-150 [percent], consistent with values measured in Solar System comets," the study's abstract states. It is common for asteroids in the Solar System to carry water.
The study was submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and can be read on the arXiv repository ,
* * *
"The discovery of interstellar comet 2I/Borisov provides an opportunity to sample the volatile composition of a comet that is unambiguously from outside our own Solar System, providing constraints on the physics and chemistry of other protostellar discs," the researchers wrote in the paper.
This is the closest solar system to Earth containing multiple planets - CNN
(CNN) Just 11 light years from earth is the GJ 15 A star system with two planets orbiting a red-dwarf star. This makes it the closest solar system to Earth that contains multiple planets.
There's Something Strange Going On Inside Neptune | Space
The storm was something of a surprise. In the southern hemisphere there was a swirling, counter-clockwise wind of up to 1,500 mph (2,414 km/h) — the strongest ever recorded. Astronomers called it the Great Dark Spot, and while it had gone by the time the Hubble Space Telescope looked at the planet five years later, they were keen to learn why the winds were so extreme.
* * *
They were also perplexed by another issue: Voyager 2 revealed that Neptune is warmer than Uranus , despite being farther from the sun. As physicist Brian Cox discussed in his BBC documentary, The Planets : "The source of this extra heat remains a mystery." But does that mean we have a double-puzzle on our hands, and can one mystery help to explain the other in some way?
Before we begin to address the two issues at hand, we must first look at what is actually meant by "warmer". Since Neptune is a gas giant , we cannot test the globally average temperature at ground level in the way that we could on Earth's solid surface. Instead, with Neptune's core likely to be small, temperature measurements must be taken at an altitude. Trouble is, which one?
Were you following this:
Planetary Astronomy-Understanding the Origin of the Solar System
S. M. Lawler, A. C. Boley, M. Connors, W. Fraser, B. Gladman, C. L. Johnson, J.J. Kavelaars, G. Osinski, L. Philpott, J. Rowe, P. Wiegert, R. Winslow
* * *
There is a vibrant and effective planetary science community in Canada. We do research in the areas of meteoritics, asteroid and trans-Neptunian object orbits and compositions, and space weather, and are involved in space probe missions to study planetary surfaces and interiors. For Canadian planetary scientists to deliver the highest scientific impact possible, we have several recommendations. Our top recommendation is to join LSST and gain access to the full data releases by hosting a data centre, which could be done by adding to the CADC, which is already highly involved in hosting planetary data and supporting computational modelling for orbital studies. We also support MSE, which can provide spectroscopy and thus compositional information for thousands of small bodies. We support a Canadian-led microsatellite, POEP, which will provide small body sizes by measuring occultations.
Best pictures of the solar system from the decade you were born - Business Insider
For decades, scientists have pointed Earthly lenses toward the sky to capture images of the cosmos. Even the earliest rockets that launched off the planet brought cameras into space.
At first, our photos of the solar system came back grainy, unclear, and colorless. The very first image taken in space, for example, came from a 33mm motion-picture camera that American scientists strapped to a captured German rocket and launched off Earth at the end of World War II. The camera fell back to Earth and shattered, but the film survived.
Other early solar-system images came as NASA and the Soviet Union explored the moon for the first time — people born in the 1950s and 60s grew up with the iconic photos of the first astronauts walking on the moon.
Since then, increasingly sophisticated missions have ventured farther into space with better and better cameras. Kids in the '80s got the first up-close images of Saturn and Neptune, while children today are accustomed to high-quality colorful shots of the deserts of Mars and swirling clouds of Jupiter.
Asteroid Hygiea is Round Enough That it Could Qualify as a Dwarf Planet, the Smallest in the
Within the Main Asteroid Belt , there are a number of larger bodies that have defied traditional classification. The largest among them is Ceres, which is followed by Vesta, Pallas, and Hygeia. Until recently, Ceres was thought to be the only object in the Main Belt large enough to undergo hydrostatic equilibrium – where an object is sufficiently massive that its gravity causes it to collapse into a roughly spherical shape.
However, it now seems that there is another body in the Main Belt that has earned the designation of "dwarf planet". Using data from the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers found compelling evidence that Hygeia is actually round , making it the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System.
Even before this came to light, Hygeia satisfied most of the qualifications for being designated as a dwarf planet – which were adopted by the IAU General Assembly in 2006. In accordance with these qualifications and definitions, a "dwarf planet" is:
Alien comets may be common, object from beyond Solar System suggests | Science | AAAS
The comet is an alien intruder from another star system. But 2I/Borisov, the second known interstellar visitor after far smaller 'Oumuamua , discovered in 2017, looks remarkably like a normal comet from our own Solar System: an object a few kilometers across spewing carbon monoxide gas, water vapor, and dust. Researchers who announced their analysis this week say the size of the two objects, along with the rate of their discovery and other factors, suggests that at any given moment more than a dozen interstellar visitors at least as large as 'Oumuamua are passing through the Solar System.
"Our current telescopes are not powerful enough to detect all of these objects," says Bryce Bolin, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and lead author of the new study. But in the future, he says, large telescopes will be able to catch these visitors more often, perhaps two or three times a year.
Happening on Twitter
It's a new month for star gazers. 🌟 What's up? A transit of Mercury and a chance to observe the regular dimming and… https://t.co/NR29cv6iTh NASASolarSystem (from Milky Way galaxy) Fri Nov 01 23:03:49 +0000 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment