Showing 20 articles starting at article 901

< Previous 20 articles        Next 20 articles >

Categories: Geoscience: Geomagnetic Storms, Space: The Solar System

Return to the site home page

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Observations by Japan's Venus climate orbiter Akatsuki have revealed an equatorial jet in the lower to middle cloud layer of the planet's atmosphere, a finding that could be pivotal to unraveling a phenomenon called superrotation.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

The Dragonfly mission concept would use an instrumented, radioisotope-powered, dual-quadcopter to explore Saturn's largest moon, Titan, one of our solar system’s “ocean worlds.”

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Dim objects called brown dwarfs, less massive than the Sun but more massive than Jupiter, have powerful winds and clouds -- specifically, hot patchy clouds made of iron droplets and silicate dust. Scientists recently realized these giant clouds can move and thicken or thin surprisingly rapidly, in less than an Earth day, but did not understand why.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Scientists have helped solve the mystery of what lies beneath the surface of Neptune -- the most distant planet in our solar system.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers conducted a 3 year continuous high-speed imaging observation at Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska, USA, and identified the physics behind the flickering of aurora. At the same time, they discovered faster flickerings at speeds of 1/60-1/50 and 1/80 of a second.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Striking images of a storm system nearly the size of Earth have astronomers doing a double-take after pinpointing its location near Neptune's equator, a region where no bright cloud has been seen before. The discovery was made at dawn on June 26 as researchers were testing the Keck telescope to see whether it could make useful observations during twilight, a time most astronomers consider unusable because it's not dark enough.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Astronomers shed light on the so far unexplored nightside circulation at the upper cloud level of Venus. Researchers have discovered unexpected patterns of slow motion and abundant stationary waves in Venus's nighttime sky.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A team of scientists will take to the skies during the Aug. 21 eclipse, using two of NASA's WB-57 jet planes to chase the shadow of the moon for unparalleled observations of the sun and Mercury.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Last year, the existence of an unknown planet in our Solar system was announced. However, this hypothesis was subsequently called into question as biases in the observational data were detected. Now astronomers have used a novel technique to analyze the orbits of the so-called extreme trans-Neptunian objects and, once again, they point out that there is something perturbing them: a planet located at a distance between 300 to 400 times the Earth-Sun separation.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A big step forward has been made in understanding a 30-year-old mystery in the process of formation of solar flares, report scientists.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Uranus' magnetosphere, the region defined by the planet's magnetic field and the material trapped inside it, gets flipped on and off like a light switch every day as it rotates along with the planet, scientists have discovered. It's 'open' in one orientation, allowing solar wind to flow into the magnetosphere; it later closes, forming a shield against the solar wind and deflecting it away from the planet.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

The plane of the solar system is warped in the belt's outer reaches, signaling the presence of an unknown Mars-to-Earth-mass planetary object far beyond Pluto, according to new research. 

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers have classified exoplanets in much the same way that biologists identify new animal species.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Since its launch in November 2013 and its orbit insertion in September 2014, MAVEN has been exploring the upper atmosphere of Mars. MAVEN is bringing insight to how the sun stripped Mars of most of its atmosphere, turning a planet once possibly habitable to microbial life into a barren desert world.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Scientists using data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have identified bright areas in craters near the moon's south pole that are cold enough to have frost present on the surface.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Plasma propulsion concepts are gridded-ion thrusters that accelerate and emit more positively charged particles than negatively charged ones. To enable the spacecraft to remain charge-neutral, a 'neutralizer' injects electrons to exactly balance the positive ion charge in the exhaust beam, but this neutralizer requires additional power from the spacecraft. Researchers are investigating how the radio-frequency self-bias effect can be used to remove the neutralizer altogether.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

In the icy bodies around our solar system, radiation emitted from rocky cores could break up water molecules and support hydrogen-eating microbes. To address this cosmic possibility, a team modeled a natural water-cracking process called radiolysis. They then applied the model to several worlds with known or suspected interior oceans, including Saturn's moon Enceladus, Jupiter's moon Europa, Pluto and its moon Charon, as well as the dwarf planet Ceres.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Astronomers have uncovered a moon orbiting the third largest dwarf planet, 2007 OR10, in the frigid outskirts of our solar system called the Kuiper Belt.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A pioneering new study uncovering the 'primitive atmosphere' surrounding a distant world could provide a pivotal breakthrough in the search to how planets form and develop in far-flung galaxies.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A kind of solar storm has puzzled scientists for its lack of typical warning signs: They seem to come from nowhere, and scientists call them stealth CMEs. Now, scientists have developed a model simulating their evolution.