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Ever since Voyager 2 beamed home spectacular images of the planets in the 1980s, planet-lovers have been hooked on auroras on other planets. Auroras are caused by streams of charged particles like electrons that come from various origins such as solar winds, the planetary ionosphere, and moon volcanism. They become caught in powerful magnetic fields and are channeled into the upper atmosphere, where their interactions with gas particles, such as oxygen or nitrogen, set off spectacular bursts of light.

In the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho, 1,416 square miles (3,668 square kilometers) of land has been named the country's first International Dark Sky Reserve by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), the leading organization that fights against the light pollution that slowly swallows our view of the universe.

By modeling the reactions of water with the crusts of early Earth and Mars, they found that the Martian crust can hold more than twice the amount of water as Earth, effectively drying out the surface of Mars. The team’s findings suggest that almost 1,000 feet (300 m) of Martian surface water could have been absorbed into the planet’s crust and is now locked-up in microscopic mineral structures. “It would be very difficult to sustain life as we know it on Mars even if surface water existed on the planet for a couple million years,” the researchers said. .. “Our...

================================================================================================================ Researchers have re-examined data captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986, and think they've found evidence of two never-before-seen moons hidden in the rings of Uranus. Uranus, the third largest planet in our Solar System, already has 27 moons that we know of - but these two new ones appear to orbit the planet more closely than any of its other natural satellites, and are causing wavy patterns in its closest rings. Although Saturn is the most famous ringed planet orbiting our Sun, it's not the only one, with the three other gas giants - Jupiter, Uranus,...

Astronomers will soon get another look at the big, ghoulishly weird space rock that buzzed Earth on Halloween three years ago. The roughly 2,100-foot-wide (640 meters) Halloween asteroid 2015 TB145 gave Earth a close shave on Oct. 31, 2015, coming within just 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers) of our planet. (For perspective, the moon orbits at an average distance of about 239,000 miles, or 384,600 km.) A Halloween flyby was quite appropriate, it turned out: Observations made at the time by a variety of instruments revealed that 2015 TB145 looks like an enormous skull, at least from some angles. ... The asteroid may...

“We’ve got a startup idea. We want $90 million to invest in projection technology for high tech billboards. On the moon.”At least, that is how we assume the pitch went from Japanese space startup iSpace Technologies Inc., which just announced the conclusion of its Series A round of venture funding. Its goal? To launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit by 2019, land on the moon the year after that, and then set up the necessary infrastructure for a moon-based advertising business. Heck, you can’t fault the company’s ambition!iSpace’s $90 million will cover two space flights in 2019 and 2020....

A MASSIVE asteroid that could have destroyed New York City skimmed past Earth – and NASA had no clue. The large space rock – dubbed 2017 VL2 – passed the planet on November 9 at an astonishing distance of just 73,000 miles, which is considered tiny in space terms. Space boffins think that if the rock measuring between 16 and 32 metres had hit, it could’ve wiped a major city such as New York off the map. The rock belongs to the Apollo group of asteroids and was first seen at ATLAS-MLO observatory in Hawaii a day later. It was...

Living bacteria were found on the surface of the International Space Station (ISS), and they might have extraterrestrial origins, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov said. The microorganisms will be studied further on Earth. Shkaplerov, an ISS expedition flight engineer who will take his third trip to the ISS in December as part of the Expedition 54 crew, said that scientists found living bacteria while they were taking samples from the surface of the station. Speaking to TASS, he said that the microorganisms might have come from outer space. ... However, traces of bacteria originating on Earth – from Madagascar – and...

A top Vatican astronomer has said that a number of public scientists claim to be atheists in order to appear credible, noting that a surprising number of scientists attend church. Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, who has spoken on a number of topics concerning science and faith, told Vancouver Sun in an interview earlier this week that many "public scientists" are insecure about their rank. "The scientists that you see on TV who are proclaimed atheists because they think it gives them credibility in science — which it doesn't — are turning off the nine-tenths of the...

Jupiter and Venus will pair up in the sky on Monday morning, shining brightly together shortly before sunrise. The two planets will appear so close together that they may look like they are just one bright star rather than two planets. This is the closest these two planets will appear all year, an astronomical event known as a conjunction. Venus and Jupiter may appear very close to each other in the morning sky, but they are actually more than 400 million miles away from each other. Venus and Jupiter will rise together about one hour before sunrise in the eastern...

Recently, scientists reported in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society the discovery of a theory-shattering exoplanet — one of countless such discoveries in the last two decades. As reported on phys.org on October 31, the hot Jupiter “should not exist according to planet formation theory.” In this episode, we outline the fundamental differences between the standard model of planet and star formation versus that of the Electric Universe.

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...