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The study, titled “Powering prolonged hydrothermal activity inside Enceladus“, recently appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy. The study was led by Gaël Choblet, a researcher with the Planetary and Geodynamic Laboratory at the University of Nantes, and included members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Charles University, and the Institute of Earth Sciences and the Geo- and Cosmochemistry Laboratory at the University of Heidelberg. ... Based on the way Enceladus orbits Saturn with a certain wobble (aka. libration), scientists have been able to make estimates of the ocean’s depth, which they place at 26 to 31 km (16 to 19 mi)....

David Coulter was in Copenhagen when he got an email that catapulted him into the stars. Coulter, 36, is a self-taught programmer. He spent 10 years in industry jobs, then left for graduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, which operates Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. “I just wanted to learn about outer space,” he said. He picked the right place. The second-year grad student found himself on a team that was the first to take images of neutron stars merging, beating a group from Harvard, perhaps explaining the origin of metals such as gold and uranium....

To date, every comet humanity has seen inside the Solar System has come from the Solar System, whether it's the Kuiper Belt or the billions of comets believed to make up the Oort Cloud. Now, however, it looks like astronomers might have found a comet of interstellar origin. They've used Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope to track C/2017 U1, an object with a very eccentric, hyperbolic orbit (that is, moving quickly enough to escape gravitational pull) that wasn't connected to the Sun. The trajectory suggests that it's a comet which escaped from a nearby star, rather than something knocked out a...

All jokes aside, tonight is the night if you want to see Uranus.

This weekend presents the Orionid meteor shower at its best, and tonight – the night of October 20-21, 2017 – may well be the shower’s peak night. Late Saturday night and Sunday morning may be good times to watch as well. On both of these nights, meteors should become visible starting at late evening. They’ll probably be most prolific in the few hours before dawn on October 21, but try watching before dawn on October 22, too. From a dark site, you might see a maximum of about 10 to 15 meteors per hour. Fortunately, today is only one day...

The spacecraft will have to survive temperatures as high as 2,500 Fahrenheit (1,371 Celsius) NASA Scientists have unveiled the Parker Solar Probe at a laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, on Monday (September 25). This latest spacecraft is being prepared to make an unprecedented plunge into the sun's atmosphere. "We're going to go into the corona, which is the home to many mysteries that have baffled scientists for decades and decades," explained project scientist Nicky Fox at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. The spacecraft will have to survive temperatures as high as 2,500 Fahrenheit (1,371 Celsius), impacts by supersonic particles...

Saturn's kittens are a group of small clumps and baby moons, or moonlets, that occupy the planet's F ring. Like the rest of Saturn's rings, this thin outer ring is made up of countless particles that range in size. When enough of those particles bump into one another and stick together, they aggregate into larger clumps — and become eligible for a kitten name. So far, the list of Saturn's kitten names includes several classics, like Fluffy, Garfield, Socks and Whiskers. These are unofficial nicknames for more-complicated (and less adorable) official titles like "Alpha Leonis Rev 9" (aka, Mittens). The...

Idaho is moving forward with plans to establish the first International Dark Sky Reserve in the United States, a designation for a location so remote from light pollution that you can even see the "interstellar dust clouds" of the Milky Way in the night sky, The Associated Press reports. Proponents of the reserve plan to file an application this fall to designate 1,400 square miles of central Idaho as part of the dark sky territory. Locals, who would voluntarily take measures to reduce light pollution, are almost unanimously behind the decision in part because they enjoy the celestial splendor as...

Starstruck: The Marveling of Job as He Looked to the Night Sky Msgr. Charles Pope • September 28, 2016 • The first reading for today (Wednesday of the 27th Week) says,The LORD alone stretches out the heavens. He made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south; He does great things past finding out, marvelous things beyond reckoning (Job 9:8-10).Due to the light pollution common in our cities today, we urbanites really don’t have any idea what we’re missing when it comes to the night sky. Up until about a hundred years ago, the night...

In July of 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced the creation of Breakthrough Listen, a decade-long project that would conduct the largest survey to date for signs of extra-terrestrial communications (ETI). As part of his non-profit organization, Breakthrough Initiatives, this survey would rely on the latest in instrumentation and software to observe the 1,000,000 closest stars and 100 closest galaxies. Using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia, the Listen science team at UC Berkeley has been observing distant stars for over a year now. And less than a week ago, they observed 15 Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) coming...

For most of human history, the distant ‘celestial sphere’ was regarded as perfect and unchanging. Stars remained in place, planets moved predictably, and the few rogue comets were viewed as atmospheric phenomena. This began to change with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s observation of the supernova of 1572 – apparently, a new star – and his studies of the Great Comet of 1577, which he proved was actually a distant object. Nonetheless, the impression of permanence is strong. There are very few astronomical objects that noticeably vary to the naked eye: only the brightest comets, novae and supernovae. For observers...

It is one of the most famous, bright stars in our galaxy, known for its strong red tint. And now scientists have used ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLTI) to capture the most detailed image of Antares yet. The stunning image reveals a mysterious process­­­­­­­­­­ occurring in Antares' extended atmosphere - which the researchers still cannot explain.

Spat over design of new Chinese telescope goes public By Yongming HuangAug. 11, 2017 , 12:13 PM A deep division among Chinese astronomers over the design of a proposed 12-meter telescope broke into public view this week as statements from competing camps went viral on social media. The dispute centers on whether to adopt a technically ambitious four-mirror design proposed by optical engineers or a conventional three-mirror option favored by astronomers. The stakes are high. It will be China’s largest optical telescope and serve as the workhorse observational facility for several generations. In a 4 August letter to the Chinese...

As the Aug. 21 solar eclipse nears, communities within the path of totality are preparing for masses of people traveling in search of the optimal viewing experience. The expected influx has placed an unprecedented task in front of cities and towns that are unaccustomed to large tourist populations. Places like Hopkinsville, Kentucky, are working to transform their communities to prepare for the event. “This is unlike anything this community has ever seen or will probably ever see again,” Hopkinsville Solar Eclipse Marketing and Events Consultant Brooke Jung said. “We’ve got people coming from 42 different states and 18 different countries.”...

The peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower is peaking this weekend! According to NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke, the Perseids are perhaps the most popular meteor shower of the year. Typical rates are about 80 meteors an hour, but in outburst years (such as in 2016) the rate can be between 150-200 meteors an hour. The meteor shower's actual peak is around 1 p.m. EDT Aug. 12, which means that the night before and the night after will both have good rates; Cooke said the show would be slightly better in the predawn hours of Aug. 12, but that there'd...

When the sun came up on May 28 in the year 585 BCE, the Medes and Lydians were still at war. They had been at each other’s throats for years, and it looked like there was no end in sight for their conflict. But something extraordinary happened on the battlefield that day, which changed everything. This episode also features an interview with Dr. Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist, and scientist emeritus at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Last week, a team of astronomers reported the first potential discovery of an exomoon–a satellite orbiting a planet around another star. Part of what is so striking about the report is the scale of this possible planet-moon system. In this case, the “moon” appears to be about the size of Neptune; the planet it orbits is some 10 times the mass of Jupiter, or about 3,000 times the mass of Earth! The system pushes at the limits of how we normally categorize objects in space and invites questions about where we stand in the scale of things. What is the...

A nearly Earth-size storm system was spotted near Neptune's equator, surprising scientists because no bright clouds have ever been seen in that location. The storm is about 6,000 miles (9,000 kilometers) in length — about three-quarters Earth's diameter — and is even huge compared to the size of Neptune: it spans nearly 30 degrees in both longitude and latitude. When astronomers studied the storm between June 26 and July 2, it appeared to get brighter. "Seeing a storm this bright at such a low latitude is extremely surprising," Ned Molter, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, said...

Astronomers first spotted an asteroid about as long as a 737 passenger jet on Sunday and analyzed its path to determine it had made a close pass by our planet three days earlier. In other words, the big space rock slipped right by us without being detected and was only seen in our cosmic rear-view mirror. While the asteroid, now named 2017 001, flew right on by without incident, it was a relatively close pass. It came within about one-third the distance between Earth and the moon, roughly 76,448 miles (123,031 km). With an estimated size of between 82 and...

Just. Wow. An angry monster lurks in the shoulder of the Hunter. We’re talking about the red giant star Betelgeuse, also known as Alpha Orionis in the constellation Orion. Recently, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) gave us an amazing view of Betelgeuse, one of the very few stars that is large enough to be resolved as anything more than a point of light.