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NASA reveals the first global geologic map of Titan Shane McGlaun - Nov 25, 2019, 7:09 am CST 1 Titan is the largest moon orbiting Saturn, and NASA has unveiled the first global map of the moon. The map shows a world of dunes, lakes, plains, craters, and other terrain. Titan is important to scientists because it is the only other known planetary body in the solar system, other than Earth, known to have stable liquid on its surface. The significant difference is that instead of water lakes as the Earth has, Titan has methane and ethane hydrocarbons on its...

Radio, IR and optical observations show evolution of plumes and their impact on belts and zones Storm clouds rooted deep in Jupiter's atmosphere are affecting the planet's white zones and colorful belts, creating disturbances in their flow and even changing their color. Thanks to coordinated observations of the planet in January 2017 by six ground-based optical and radio telescopes and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer and her colleagues have been able to track the effects of these storms -- visible as bright plumes above the planet's ammonia ice clouds -- on the belts in which...

The universality of Saturn worship 6000 years ago. NASA image: Israelites appear to have been the first people to figure out that humans should not be worshiping dwarf stars (Jupiter, Saturn...). And if worshiping dwarf stars and former dwarf stars was a problem 6000 years ago, it is more of a problem now. Troy McLachlan's book describes the connection between ancient Satanic ritual, drug dealing, central banking, and modern Satanic ritual (Jeffrey Epstein and the Hildabeast). The Saturn Death Cult

The planets are young: Saturn by Russell Grigg Published: 4 September 2019 (GMT+10) We continue our response to the 2019 BBC-TV series The Planets, narrated by Professor Brian Cox. In this article we are considering the fourth episode, titled Life beyond the sun, Saturn. (for the others, see Related Articles, below). Prof. Brian Cox begins this episode with something of a eulogy to Saturn: “Beyond the warm worlds of the inner solar system, beyond the gas giant Jupiter, in the freezing regions far beyond the sun, lies Saturn, a planet made unique thanks to a nearly 300,000-kilometre-wide ring of frozen...

uly will be a great month to view the rings of Saturn. You can see them in any telescope that magnifies to at least 20 power, but the larger the aperture and the sharper the image, the more detail you can make out. Tonight (July 9), Saturn is at opposition, when it lies on the opposite side of the sky from the sun. This is also when the planet's apparent size is greatest and it puts on an all-night performance with greatest gleam, shining at magnitude +0.1. Compared to the 21 brightest stars, Saturn would rank seventh, just a shade...

Cloud-free skies are expected on Tuesday night across much of the interior West, southern Plains and Northeast, leading to uninterrupted viewing. Saturn will be above the horizon all night long, rising in the southeast around sunset and slowly gliding across the sky before setting in the southwest around dawn. No special equipment is needed to see the planet as it is bright enough to see with the unaided eye, but a telescope is required to be able to see the planet's famous rings. These rings are made up of pieces of ice, dust and debris orbiting the planet. Jupiter just...

NASA discovered Saturn’s mysterious atmosphere boasts diamonds raining down on the planet, it was revealed during a new documentary. “Below the upper atmosphere great clouds of water grow and lightning 10,000 times more powerful than on Earth illuminates the sky. “This lightning transforms the methane gas into huge clouds of soot.” He added: “Deeper still, the pressure grows so great that these chunks of soot are likely transferred into diamonds. “But even these diamonds will succumb to the pressure of Saturn, liquifying.

The rings of Uranus are invisible to all but the largest telescopes—they weren't even discovered until 1977—but they're surprisingly bright in new heat images of the planet taken by two large telescopes in the high deserts of Chile. The thermal glow gives astronomers another window onto the rings, which have been seen only because they reflect a little light in the visible, or optical, range and in the near-infrared. The new images taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) allowed the team for the first time to measure the temperature of the rings:...

Astronomers have discovered that the planet Uranus has a blue ring - only the second found in the Solar System. Like the blue ring of Saturn, it probably owes its existence to an accompanying small moon. Scientists suspect subtle forces acting on dust in the rings allow smaller particles to persist while larger ones are recaptured by the moon. Smaller particles reflect blue light, giving the ring its distinctive colour, the US team reports in Science. All other rings - those around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are made up of both large and small particles, making the...

While searching for the source of methane on Saturn’s large moon Titan, researchers found a completely unexpected corridor of methane ice wrapping nearly halfway around the moon. Three orientations of Titan’s globe. The icy corridor is mapped in blue. Image via Caitlin Griffith/UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.A research team has discovered huge ice feature on Titan while trying to understand where Saturn’s largest moon gets all of its methane. Like Earth, Titan has rain, seas and a surface of eroding organic material. However, on Titan it is methane, not water, that makes up the raindrops and fills the lakes.A team...

Debate Is Over: Saturn Is Young April 23, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Scientists have run out of options to keep Saturn and its rings and moons billions of years old. It’s time to face the music. The most significant finding of the Cassini mission may be the realization that the Saturn system is young. By “young,” one can even accept the current estimate that the rings are 100 million years old. That’s still young. To see why this is shocking, look at the following timeline, starting at left with the assumed age of the solar system, 4.5 billion years...

…[S]ientists have discovered enough planets around other stars to offer a clearer picture of the average solar system, and to reveal the ways in which our own solar system is really weird. For instance, most systems have gas giant planets, but those "hot Jupiters" tend to orbit very close to their host stars. That makes our solar system an outlier. All our system’s gas giants orbit in the outer solar system, while the inner region is reserved for rocky planets like our own. But according to a new simulation, our home system is even weirder than we thought. One of...

Monday morning (Feb.18), you'll be able to watch two planets that will pass in the dawn. One planet is very slowly descending into the dawn twilight and into eventual obscurity, while the other will become increasingly prominent in the weeks and months to come. The planets in question are Venus and Saturn. Look for them around 5:45 a.m. local time, low above the southeast horizon. Brilliant Venus, shining with a steady silvery-white glow, will be passing about 1.1 degree above and to the left of the much dimmer and yellower Saturn. If you have a telescope you might want to...

On the night of the new moon itself, observers in midnorthern latitudes will see the classic winter constellations of Orion, Taurus, Gemini and Canis Major for most of the night. All of these constellations will be above the horizon by 7 p.m. local time. Orion's distinctive belt of three stars — Alnilam, Alnitak and Mintaka — will be at an altitude of about 40 degrees in the south-southeast, while Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, will be about 21 degrees high. Looking just to the east and south of Orion (to the right and upward in the northern hemisphere),...

The spacecraft that have peered through the yellowish haze surrounding Saturn's moon Titan discovered a strange, yet strangely familiar world where life could theoretically take root. Now, scientists want to return — this time buoyed by Earth's fascination with drone technology. That's precisely what a team of scientists working on a proposed mission called Dragonfly want to do: combine terrestrial drone technology and instruments honed by Mars exploration to investigate the complex chemical reactions taking place on Saturn's largest moon. Later this year, NASA will need to decide between that mission and another finalist proposal, which would collect a sample...

Saturn's rings make it one of the most striking planets in the solar system, but scientists believe they could disappear in less than a 100 million years -- which isn't all that long when you consider that the gas giant itself is more than 4 billion years old. New research from NASA shows that the rings, made predominantly of water ice, are being pulled apart by the planet's gravity and onto Saturn's surface as deluges of "ring rain." "We estimate that this 'ring rain' drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn's rings...

Voyager 2 has entered interstellar space. The spacecraft slipped out of the huge bubble of particles that encircles the solar system on November 5, becoming the second ever human-made craft to cross the heliosphere, or the boundary between the sun and the stars.Coming in second place is no mean achievement. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to exit the solar system in 2012. But that craft’s plasma instrument stopped working in 1980, leaving scientists without a direct view of the solar wind, hot charged particles constantly streaming from the sun (SN Online: 9/12/13). Voyager 2’s plasma sensors are still working,...

“It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. ________________ “The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018. Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018 and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding, says Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com. Data from NASA’s TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere. To help track the latest developments, Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s...

On the night of Feb. 20, the full moon will pass into Earth's shadow in an event that will be visible across all of the United States and Canada. The total lunar eclipse will be made even more striking by the presence of the nearby planet Saturn and the bright bluish star, Regulus. Eclipses in the distant past often terrified viewers who took them as evil omens. Certain lunar eclipses had an overwhelming effect on historic events. One of the most famous examples is the trick pulled by Christopher Columbus.

The image has been doing the rounds over the past few days, racking up tens of thousands of views and retweets on social media. But the image was created using computer graphics. Some people have confused the image for a real photo simply because it appeared on the NASA website, but the description of the image makes it clear that it’s just an artist’s depiction: This artist’s concept shows an over-the-shoulder view of Cassini making one of its Grand Finale dives over Saturn. The Cassini probe was a joint project between NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency), and the Italian...