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Categories: Energy: Fossil Fuels, Space: The Solar System

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Astrophysicists have confirmed that Crantor, a large asteroid with a diameter of 70 km has an orbit similar to that of Uranus and takes the same amount of time to orbit the Sun. Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that this and a further two objects of the group of the Centaurs are co-orbital with Uranus.

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What is the long-range weather forecast for the giant planets Uranus and Neptune? These planets are home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, hurricane-like storms as large around as Earth, immense weather systems that last for years and fast-flowing jet streams. Researchers set an upper limit for the thickness of jet streams on Uranus and Neptune.

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The European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory has provided the first images of a dust belt -- produced by colliding comets or asteroids -- orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system.

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When NASA's twin GRAIL spacecraft made their final descent for impact onto the Moon's surface last December, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's sophisticated payload was in position to observe the effects. As plumes of gas rose from the impacts, the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard LRO detected the presence of mercury and hydrogen and measured their time evolution as the gas rapidly expanded into the vacuum of space at near-escape velocities.

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A detailed study of Venus' South Polar Vortex shows a much more chaotic and unpredictable cyclone than previously thought. The analysis reveals that the center of rotation of the vortex wanders around the pole differently at different altitude levels in the clouds of Venus. In its stroll around the Pole, in layers separated by 20 km, the vortex experiences unpredictable changes in its morphology.

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Many spacecraft just fade away, drifting silently through space after their mission is over, but not GRAIL. NASA's twin GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft went out in a blaze of glory Dec. 17, 2012, when they were intentionally crashed into a mountain near the moon's north pole.

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A distant world gleaming in sunlight, Earth's twin planet, Venus, shines like a bright beacon in images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.

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By analyzing Mercury's rocky surface, scientists have been able to partially reconstruct the planet's history over billions of years.

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Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection, and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere, the corona. On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three.

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NASA's Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun. The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, measuring about one-third the size of Earth. It is smaller than Mercury, which made its detection a challenge.

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Planetary scientists have found new evidence suggesting auroras – similar to Earth’s Aurora Borealis - occur on bodies outside our solar system.

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On Jan. 13, 2013, at 2:24 a.m. EST, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME. Not to be confused with a solar flare, a CME is a solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and reach Earth one to three days later.

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Newly released Hubble Space Telescope images of a vast debris disk encircling the nearby star Fomalhaut and a mysterious planet circling it may provide forensic evidence of a titanic planetary disruption in the system.

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Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The discovery of an asteroid belt-like band of debris around Vega makes the star similar to another observed star called Fomalhaut. The data are consistent with both stars having inner, warm belts and outer, cool belts separated by a gap. This architecture is similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our own solar system.

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On June 6, 2012, Venus passed directly between Earth and the sun, in a so-called transit where the planet appears as a silhouette against the solar disk, something that will not happen again until Dec. 5, 2117. A team of Italian astronomers used the opportunity to perform an unusual and challenging experiment, looking at the sunlight reflected off the moon ('moonlight') to see how it changed during the transit. This technique could help scientists to find planets in orbit around other stars.

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Fifty years ago on a mid-December day, NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft sailed close to the shrouded planet Venus, marking the first time any spacecraft had ever successfully made a close-up study of another planet. The flyby, 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) away from Earth, gave America its first bona fide space "first" after five years in which the Soviet Union led with several space exploration milestones. Designed and built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the successful Mariner 2 spacecraft ushered in a new era of solar system exploration.

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Two researchers have recently proposed the first ever model explaining how the great majority of regular satellites in our solar system were formed out of planet rings. The model, the only one of its kind, was first tested in 2010 on Saturn's moons. It seems to account for the present distribution of “giant” planets and also explains how the satellites of the “terrestrial” planets such as Earth or Pluto  came into being. These results are a major step forward in understanding and explaining the formation of planet systems across the universe.

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Six years of observations by the European Space Agency's Venus Express have shown large changes in the sulfur dioxide content of the planet's atmosphere, and one intriguing possible explanation is volcanic eruptions. The thick atmosphere of Venus contains over a million times as much sulfur dioxide as Earth's, where almost all of the pungent, toxic gas is generated by volcanic activity. Most of the sulfur dioxide on Venus is hidden below the planet's dense upper cloud deck, because the gas is readily destroyed by sunlight. That means any sulfur dioxide detected in Venus' upper atmosphere above the cloud deck must have been recently supplied from below.

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New research hints that planets orbiting white and brown dwarfs, even in the habitable zone, face a "difficult path to habitability."

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Hoping to expand our understanding of auroras and other fleeting atmospheric events, a team of space-weather researchers designed and built a new camera with unprecedented capabilities that can simultaneously image multiple spectral bands, in essence different wavelengths or colors, of light. The camera produced the first-ever hyperspectral images of auroras -- commonly referred to as "the Northern (or Southern) Lights"-- and may already have revealed a previously unknown atmospheric phenomenon.